This Tuesday, Toshiba and SanDisk signed an agreement according to which the companies would be teaming up to develop and manufacture 3D memory. The news was largely overlooked as all eyes in the hardware industry were drawn to NVIDIA's official release of its latest GT200 series of graphics cards. But, thanks to the Inquirer, that has spotted a U.S. Stock market regulator report filed by SanDisk, we now know that the companies will contribute to and cross-license technology for 3D memory chip development and production.

Such an action has been a long time coming, as the 3D memory chip concept goes back to 2001. It was then that a company called Matrix discovered how to stack memory arrays vertically and not just horizontally. Unfortunately, the potential of the discovery wasn't fully exploited, although it did provide the means to significantly lower costs and to boost the amounts of memory able to be stored on a chip. Not even Matrix's partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) brought positive results in the matter.

In 2005, SanDisk grabbed hold of Matrix, but it took the NAND Flash manufacturer three years to come up with some sort of plan for bringing Matrix's discovery into the development stage. Unlike Matrix's approach at producing this technology, the new joint venture aims at creating rewritable chips.

According to the above-mentioned statement, Toshiba will pay licensing fees to SanDisk for the privilege of being part of the venture.

Toshiba has some experience in this filed, as it has tried in the past as well to come out with its own rewritable 3D flash memory chips. The working samples Toshiba did make public were dubbed BiCS (Bit Cost Memory) but, unfortunately, they followed the same path as Matrix's solution.

Still, we shouldn't get our hopes high, just yet, as we are most probably going to see the first working models in about three or four years, despite the combined power and know-how of both companies. Then again, when the chips finally arrive, they will most certainly replace NAND as the standard for memory chips.