Toshiba Corporation once again reinforces its leadership in the development and fabrication of powerful, high density NAND flash memory with its latest announcement concerning the introduction of 16Gb (2 gigabyte) and 8Gb (1 gigabyte) NAND flash memory chips. These chips are fabricated with the aid of cutting-edge 56-nanometer process technology co-developed with SanDisk Corporation of Milpitas, California (USA). Thus, Toshiba presents 16Gb single-chip NAND flash memory - the highest density yet achieved.

The official press release presents that Toshiba is now increasing shipments of commercial samples of new 8Gb (1 gigabyte) single-chip, multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memories - the current mainstream density - with availability starting today . Toshiba also intends starting shipping commercial samples of 16Gb (2 gigabyte) NAND flash memories in the late first quarter of 2007.

"The adoption of MLC technology and improved programming efficiency allows the new chips to offer high density and write performance. Application of 56nm process technology realizes 16Gb, twice the memory density per chip achieved with 8Gb 70nm technology, achieving the largest single-chip density in NAND flash memory. A write performance of 10-megabytes/second, twice that of Toshiba's present MLC products, reflects the efficiency obtained with advanced process technology and doubling page size, the amount of data that can be written at one time, from 2,112 bytes to 4,314 bytes."

One could strap a few of these new chips together, ending up with a killer high-capacity storage device that could compete with high-end HDDs. If Toshiba will be able to bring the price down even more, users will be finally saying bye-bye to those noisy, hot and power-hungry spinning hard drives once and for all, while PC cases could shrink even more and power supplies won't have to deal with storage devices anymore.