Samsung unveils 32Gb flash made from 40nm technology
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(InfoWorld) - Samsung Electronics showed off its first 40-nanometer chip, a 32Gb NAND flash memory that can be used in memory cards able to store up to 64GB of data, or 40 movies. The latest step into smaller chip manufacturing methods brings Samsung to the forefront of chip production putting it ahead of other bit manufacturers, including Intel, which has onlyÂ announced chips built at 45nm. The chips are also the seventh generation of NAND flash memory to follow in a Moore's law-type theory posited by Samsung, that the company will double the capacity of NAND flash every 12 months. Such advances are vitalÂ to the consumer electronics industry. Users are demanding ever smaller devices that can do more, such as handsets with built-in mobile phone, computing, camera, and digital music playing functions. Demand for more storage to keep photos, videos, songs and other data has expanded rapidly over the past few years, and analysts expect the trend to continue. The 40nm chip production technique is key to making chips smaller, faster, more powerful, and cheaper to produce. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and the measurement is a guide to the size of the transistors and other parts that are etched onto the chips. Typically, the more transistors, and the closer they are together, the faster the chip can perform tasks. The company also revealed a new design technique, Charge Trap Flash (CTF), that will allow it to eventually shrink NAND chip features to 20nm, and produce 256Gb chips. In the 32Gb chips, the control gate in the CTF is only a fifth as big as conventional control gates on chips in a typical floating gate structure. With CTF, there is no floating gate. Instead, data is temporarily placed in a holding chamber made of silicon nitride. Samsung also released a new chip for its hybrid drives, a kind of hard disk drive aimed at laptops that uses NAND flash as a disk cache, to speed boot-up times and reduce power consumption The new chip, dubbed an SoC (system-on-chip) because it does the work of several chips, incorporates up to 4GB of NAND flash as a data buffer and helps further speeds boot-up times while lengthening battery life, the company said. The chips will be in mass production in November. Samsung is one of several companies working on hybrid drives. Seagate TechnologyÂ and IntelÂ are also developing the technology for notebook computers.
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64GB NAND flash memory drives will be an option in a forthcoming Compaq series.
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Samsung Electronics Co. has made a breakthrough in semiconductor technology by developing the world&#39;s first two-gigabyte double-data-rate dynamic random access memory chip using existing technology.
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While Compact Flash may have been the dominant removable memory format for years, SanDisk says the future is now in SDHC, announcing a 32GB card that will go on sale in April.
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(InfoWorld) - Samsung Electronics unveiled a new kind of memory chip Monday, PRAM (phase-change RAM), aimed at replacing NOR flash memory in mobile phones. The new kind of chip, which will be commercially available in 2008, combines the faster data transfer speeds of DRAM (dynamic RAM) with the ability to retain data after power is shut off in a device, similar to flash memory. PRAM is effectively 30-times faster than flash memory, easier to manufacture, and will have a life span 10 times longer, Samsung said. Samsung will have to compete against Intel and Spansion, the two biggest makers of NOR flash memory, with PRAM. NOR is popular in mobile phones for its ability to quickly launch software programs. Most handsets contain NOR and NAND flash, the more popular flash memory valued for its ability to store huge amounts of data, such as songs, videos and photos. But PRAM will also have to compete with a host of other types of memory used in mobile phones, including DRAM, which costs less than most other memory chips due to its widespread use in PCs and video game consoles. Samsung plans to launch PRAM initially in a 512Mb capacity, the same as the prototype it showed off on Monday.
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South Korea's Samsung Electronics said it has developed the world's highest-capacity SRAM (static random access memory) chip for high-performance networking systems.
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South Korean semiconductor maker Samsung Electronics has begun shipping the world&#39;s first 512-megabit (Mb) GDDR3 memory device, a graphics double-data-rate synchronous DRAM for graphics card makers and electronic game console manufacturers.
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The Samsung device has at least twice the density of any graphics memory available today, offering gamers much richer textures and imagery, the electronics giant said.
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SOUTH Korea &#39;s Samsung Electronics, the world&#39;s largest memory chipmaker, is to invest $US24 billion ($31 billion) in new chip production lines over the next six years.
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Samsung unveiled a new mobile chipset with up to 4GB of storage capacity, potentially eliminating the need for add-on memory cards.
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Samsung Electronics has developed an ultra small, fingernail-sized digital imaging flash memory card that is less than one-third the size of existing memory cards.
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South Korea's Samsung Electronics unveiled a new semiconductor chip that it says uses new technology to greatly enhance the quality of images on handset display panels.
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Samsung Electronics has created an innovative memory chip designed to boost the processing speed in mobile phones for handling digital video and other data-intensive applications.
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(InfoWorld) - Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has begun producing a flash memory-based solid-state disk drive for mobile computing applications. The drive is the latest in a growing line of products from Samsung and competitors that make use of flash memory chips instead of magnetic disc recording technology. Compared to today's hard-disk drives, SSDs are lighter, use less power and can read and write data faster. They are also more expensive but the price difference has been narrowing as flash chips have become cheaper so SSDs are now starting to appear in some laptops. The new Samsung drive has a capacity of 64G bytes and is the same size as a conventional 1.8-inch hard-disk drive. It's designed to be used in sub-notebook class computers, ultra-mobile PCs and other devices like portable media players. Samsung said it is seeing demand increase for such products, particularly from companies making ultra portable PCs. At the Computex show in Taipei earlier this month two major contract PC makers, First International Computer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc., both showed prototype ultra portables and several other companies have already put such machines on sale. Samsung is one of the world's largest manufacturers of flash memory chips so the company has a lot to gain from SSDs becoming more popular. It estimated that the market for SSDs will increase 270 percent between now and 2010 to become the largest growth segment in the NAND flash memory market. The price of the drive, which will be sold to PC makers and not end-users, was not disclosed. Â
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Sandisk increased capacities and bandwidths of its CompactFlash product line. The cards are now available with up to eight GByte of space and twice the data transfer speed of the previous generation.
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com. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. announced a line of flash-memory cards that are smaller than a thumbnail, as the firm said it had defeated the nagging problem of high power consumption.
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Samsung is moving to a 30nm production technology that ups the storage and speed of NAND flash memory chips for iPods and other gadgets.