Toshiba Hastens NAND Flash Production
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Toshiba expands production of smaller, more energy-efficient NAND flash memory chips.
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Toshiba and SanDisk will build a new state-of-the-art flash memory chip factory together starting in 2009, and will share the output from it, the companies announced Tuesday.Separately, Toshiba announced it will begin construction of two more chip factories of its own at the same time. One of the plants will be for NAND flash memory, while the second will be for other semiconductor products.The three factories will make 300-millimeter (12-inch) wafers, which can cost up to $3.6 billion each to build and equip with the latest technology. The companies did not announce the size of their investments.All three will be built in Japan. No site in Japan has yet been determined for the joint Toshiba/SanDisk factory, while the two Toshiba-only factories will be built in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture, and in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture.Toshiba and SanDisk are just two players in a competitive NAND flash memory market. Other manufacturers include South Korea&#39;s Samsung Electronics; Japan&#39;s Elpida Memories; Taiwan&#39;s Powerchip Semiconductor, and a company jointly created by Micron and Intel of the U.S., IM Flash Technologies.The new factories will help Toshiba cement its number one ranking among NAND flash memory makers, said Wayne Chen, NAND flash analyst at DRAMeXchange Technology, which runs an online clearing house for the chips. Samsung is Toshiba&#39;s fiercest rival in NAND.The global memory chip industry is currently suffering from a production glut that has sent the prices of some memory chips down below their production costs. The glut seems set to continue, as a number of manufacturers either have new factories under construction or have announced plans for new production lines over the past several months.Toshiba&#39;s factory announcement could further depress the NAND flash market psychologically because traders may believe the glut will continue due to more factory construction, said Chen. But output from the factories won&#39;t hit the market for years, he pointed out.By targeting construction for 2009, Toshiba is signalling confidence that demand for flash memory, and NAND flash in particular, will rise to end the current glut. Production at the Toshiba-SanDisk plant will not start until 2010, according to their memorandum of understanding. The two Toshiba factories are also targeting production for 2010.The good news for users is that the massive investments will keep the price of NAND flash memory down, which should lead to larger storage capacities in digital cameras, digital music players and other consumer devices.NAND flash memory has grown in popularity over the past several years due to its ability to store songs, pictures and other data when power is shut off, as well as for its reliability in consumer devices such as Apple iPods and the iPhone. NAND manufacturers are targeting SSDs (solid-state disks) as another major product area of the future, to replace HDDs (hard disk drives). SSDs use less power than HDDs, an important difference in small devices, and are more reliable because they contain no moving parts.
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Cost: $288m Toshiba has settled its rancorous NAND flash memory lawsuit with Lexar, but at a hefty price.â¦
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By YURI KAGEYAMA  TOKYO - Toshiba is recalling 340,000 laptop batteries made by Sony Corp. because of problems with recharging them, the latest in a string of embarrassing defects and production glitches for Sony.
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By YURI KAGEYAMA TOKYO - Toshiba is recalling 340,000 laptop batteries worldwide made by Sony Corp., the latest in a series of problems for the company.
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Japanese electronics group Toshiba Corp  (6502.T) posted a worse-than-expected 25 percent drop in  quarterly operating profit after tumbling flash memory chip  prices ate into margins.
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(InfoWorld) - Toshiba and Micron TechnologyÂ have settled a number of outstanding lawsuits regarding alleged patent infringement and theft of trade secrets related to computer memory chips. Under terms of an agreement announced Friday, Toshiba will purchase some Micron patents related to semiconductor technology and license patents previously owned by Lexar Media, which wasÂ acquired by MicronÂ earlier this year. Toshiba will pay $288 million to Micron in return for the patents and licenses, Toshiba said. The amount is substantially less than the $465 million inÂ compensation awarded to LexarÂ by a California court in 2005. The payment has been on hold since late last year after Toshiba succeeded in having the damages reconsidered andÂ filed an appealÂ seeking to overturn the original guilty verdict. Earlier this year Lexar raised the stakes by asking the U.S. International Trade Commission toÂ bar the importÂ of some of Toshiba's NAND flash-memory chips and products containing them. The ITC action will now be dismissed, along with others at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and the California Court of Appeals, Toshiba said. Toshiba became business partners with Lexar when it invested $3 million in the company in 1997 and acquired a seat on its board of directors. According to Lexar's original complaint, Toshiba sat on the board for two and a half years and gained access to the company's product plans and technology, while at the same time working with Lexar rival SanDisk. Â
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Toshiba has filed patent infringement lawsuits in Japan and the US against South Korea&#39;s Hynix Semiconductor. The suits allege that Hynix violated Toshiba&#39;s patents covering NAND-type flash memory chips.
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Loan cutbacks put dent in Numonyx Intel and STMicroelectronics NV have been forced to delay the merger of their cash-starved flash memory units because of "significant turmoil" in the financial markets.â¦
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The distinction between flash memory and hard disk drives are fading rapidly as the two storage mediums encroach one another's territory Â including marked advances announced at the International Consumer Electronics Show Monday.
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Samsung Electronics has developed ultra-fast 1Gb OneNand Flash memory designed for next-generation mobile phones which it claims boasts a fourfold read speed increase over conventional Nand Flash performance.
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InfoWorld - Breaking the speed barrier of traditional flash memory, Intel and Micron Thursday announced a new flash memory architecture that increases the data transfer rates in consumer electronics by cutting the bottlenecks affecting conventional NAND flash memory.
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The two companies have collaborated on a new NAND flash memory technology which is said to speed up data transfer rates fivefold.
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Smaller-capacity versions coming Q1 2008 Chip giant Intel has begun sampling a solid-state drive (SSD) designed for handheld devices. The product's known in the trade as 'a stack of Flash chips'.â¦
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Toshiba Corp, Japan&#39;s second largest chipmaker, has agreed to start selling a type of semiconductor known as flash memory to Apple Computer Inc, maker of the best-selling iPod digital music player.
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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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Toshiba expects demand for NAND, widely used for data storage in portable electronics like Apple Inc.'s Pod digital media player devices, to grow by an average 130% a year between 2006 and 2010.