Samsung continues its advancements in the area of flash
memory development with today's announcement of 8Gb NAND flash memory devices.
The new high density multi-level-cell (MLC) memory is based on a 60nm
manufacturing process and allows a 25% increase in production output compared
to 70nm designs.
This latest advancement allows Samsung to offer customers
8GB memory solutions which use two vertically stacked 4GB packages (each
featuring four vertically stacked 8Gb dies). These 8GB NAND flash memory
devices will be available starting in the third quarter. Samsung is also
planning to use these 8Gb flash memory devices in its moviNAND product family
to produce 2GB memory solutions for mobile handsets. This 3D packaging was announced by the company in April, 2006.
It won't be long before the portable media player (PMP)
market starts taking advantage of this latest advancement in flash technology.
It's been rumored that Apple has a new
iPod Nano model on tap for its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that
could make use of the new 8Gb NAND flash devices.
Just last month, Samsung introduced 2Gb 60nm flash memory
for its OneNAND family. Those chips offer sustained read speeds of 108MB/sec
and sustained writes of 17MB/sec and are aimed at hybrid and SSD hard drives.