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Samsung's Announces 16Gb Flash |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Tuesday, 01 May 2007 |
Samsung is the first memory maker to begin mass producing 16Gb NAND
flash memory chips promising more storage for your mobile devices. Not
only are the new chips bigger capacities, they are also faster and
cheaper to make than their predecessors says the Korean company.
More storage for your mobile content sounds good, faster and cheaper is
just great. Thanks to a new manufacturing process in use by Samsung,
these 16Gb chips set a new benchmark.
Fabricated at 51 nanometers (nm), the finest process technology ever
used in memory mass production, the new flash chips can be produced 60
percent more
efficiently than those produced with 60nm process technology at which
Samsung
began production of its 60nm 8Gb NAND flash chips only last August.
51 nanometers is so diminutive, its the type of scale only recently
reserved for high-value silicon production such as CPU chips, but the
high volumes anticipated by Samsung for the new chips make it all
worthwhile. Demand for 16Gb NAND flash memory is
expected to grow rapidly, pushing this new chip into the mainstream
market beginning late this year and pushing global sales through 2010
to US$21 billion.
"In rolling out the densest NAND flash in the world, we are throwing
open the gates to a much wider playing field for flash-driven consumer
electronics," said Jim Elliott, director, flash marketing, Samsung
Semiconductor. "To minimize production costs and improve performance,
we have applied the finest process technology a ‘half generation' ahead
of the industry, which is introducing 55nm and higher."
The scale of the chips enable to the faster speeds, resulting in a read
and write rate approximately 80 per cent better than current processing
speeds on similar chips.
A similar chip manufactured at 60nm could read data at the rate of
17MBps and write at 4.4MBps. COmpare that to a 51nm chip which is
capoable of 30MBps reads and writes at 8MBps. That's almost twice as
fast!
NAND flash memory reads and writes data in units called "pages." The
60nm NAND flash memory is designed with a 2 KiloByte (KB) page size,
but the 51nm 16Gb version can process data in 4KB pages, which
translates to the 'near' doubling of the data rate.
The 16Gb chips are are expected to be plugged into music phones and other consumer devices such as digital cameras.
www.samsung.com
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