14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung Electronics has announced that it has become the first company to begin the mass production of 16Gb NAND flash, which is the highest capacity to be available on the market.
According to the company, it will be manufacturing the devices in 51 nanometers, the finest process technology to be used in memory mass production up to date.
The 51nm NAND flash chips can be produced with up to 60 percent more efficiency than in the case of those manufactured through the 60nm process technology. Samsung has reached this point just eight months after announcing the production of its latest 60nm 8GB NAND flash in August last year.
"In rolling out the densest NAND flash in the world, we are throwing open the gates to a much wider playing field for flash-driven consumer electronics," said Jim Elliott, director, flash marketing, Samsung Semiconductor. "To minimize production costs and improve performance, we have applied the finest process technology a 'half generation' ahead of the industry, which is introducing 55nm and higher."
The new 16Gb chip has a multi level cell (MLC) structure and can facilitate capacity expansion by offering 16 gigabytes of memory in one single memory card. It also offers read and write speeds that are around 80 percent faster than the current MLC data processing speeds.
Samsung will provide an optimized suite of Flash software and firmware-incorporated storage devices for music phones and MP3 players to support 4kb packages as well as offer a multi-plane performance optimization feature and wear-leveling for improved reliability. Since most of today's mobile phones have music playback capabilities and digital cameras, it is quite important that enough storage space be provided for users. That is why demand for 16Gb NAND flash memory is expected to grow rapidly.