Micron Technology, one of the world's leading manufacturers of NAND flash solutions, has recently announced that it has started the mass production of the high-capacity 34nm NAND flash, which has been adopted by Lexar Media for the company's new flash memory cards. Designed to meet the growing demand for higher-capacity, portable storage solutions, the new chips are available in 16Gb and 32Gb capacities, providing end-users with an increased storage solution.

“With our new 16Gb and 32Gb NAND chips in mass production, we are enabling customers to design cost-effective, high-capacity storage in their small-form factor products, using less space and fewer die,” said Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron's memory group. “In addition, the high-speed interface is ideal in the industry's quest to continue to increase throughput performance for solid state drives (SSD).”

According to Micron, its newly-designed 32Gb multi-level cell (MLC) NAND chip is 17 percent smaller than its first generation of 32Gb chips, while the 16Gb MLC NAND chip measures only 84mm. As far as performances go, both solutions are designed to deliver increased transfer speeds of up to 200Mb/s (using an ONFI 2.1 synchronous interface), compared to the traditional SLC NAND, which offers 40Mb/s. These solutions enable memory device manufacturers to develop products that deliver increased performance and capacity, with the NAND interface offering twice the throughput of today's existing SATA 3Gb/s solutions.

According to Micron, these new NAND chips have been implemented by Lexad Media in its high-performance memory cards, including microSD, microSDHC, Memory Stick Micro (M2) cards. Various SD, SDHC, CompactFlash and Memory Stick PRO Duo cards will be made available by the end of September. The company added that Lexar Media would utilize the 34nm NAND in its upcoming USB flash drives.