Sampling of 16Gb NAND flash takes-off at Samsung

World leader in advanced semiconductor technology solutions, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., today announced the sampling of its 16-gigabit (Gb) NAND flash memory manufactured on 50 nano process technology.

The first 50-nanometer 16Gb NAND Flash designed for Solid State Disk (SSD) and other high-density applications has a multi-level cell (MLC) design with a 4Kbyte (KB) page size which enhances both its reading and writing speeds.

The company officials’ claim that a shift from the conventional 2KB paging system for MLC NAND flash to a 4KB page function doubles reading speed while increases write performance by 1.5 times.

Whether used as an external memory card, or as a built in flash, the new non-volatile memory chip promises faster data transfer speeds both while storing and reading data files.

The new chip is capable of producing 32 hours of DVD video recording, four-megabyte of digital music files, 8,000 songs, or a newspaper's 200-year-old archive.

The new series can also handle all the main functionality for Apple's iPod portable music player series, such as the user interface and management of music files.

With market analysts predicting the NAND flash chip market to grow to US$4.5 billion by 2010, the NAND chip is expected to replace hard-disk drives embedded in mobile gizmos ranging from digital cameras to MP3 players and also help the leading chip maker to enhance its original cost competitiveness in the high-density, high-performance chip sector.

Though the company has started supplying the 16-gigabit NAND flash memory chips to domestic mobile device manufacturers, the mass production is planned to commence in the first quarter of 2007.

Spread over 57 countries, Samsung is a leading producer of digital TVs, memory chips, mobile phones and TFT-LCDs.

The company consists of five main business units: Digital Appliance Business, Digital Media Business, LCD Business, Semiconductor Business and Telecommunication Network Business.