Toshiba Ships Speedier Flash Memory

Toshiba started shipping samples of 1 gigabit NAND-type flash memory chips on Monday. The chips were jointly developed with SanDisk, Toshiba announced.

The new chips will be fabricated with the 0.13-micron process technology, the company says in a statement.

The NAND-type flash memory is designed to have faster rewrite characteristics and higher storage volume than NOR type memory, and is used in memory card formats such as Smart Media, Compact Flash, and Secure Digital cards for mobile devices.

Perfecting the Product

The companies released their first 1-gigabit flash memory last November using stacked 512 megabit chips and multilevel cell technology to store several bits of information per cell. However, the multilevel technology slowed down the memory's data reading speed, according to Kenichi Sugiyama, a Toshiba spokesperson. Toshiba has been in partnership with SanDisk on the development of this NAND-type flash memory since 1999.

By February this year Toshiba, in Tokyo, and SanDisk, in Sunnyvale, California, were able to develop a flash memory chip that can hold up to 1 gigabit. The new product uses this chip and the single-level cell technology, and therefore still has a fast reading speed, Sugiyama says.

By adopting the advanced 0.13-micron technology for the 1 gigabit chip, the companies were also able to reduce the chip size, compared to their existing 512 megabit chip, Sugiyama says.

Coming Soon

Samples of the chip in TSOP (Thin Small Outline Package) packaging were shipped on Monday at $67 and samples in an LGA (Land Grid Array) package will be available next month, also at $67.

Mass production of the both products is expected to start at the end of this year, at the rate of 300,000 units a month, Toshiba says.

Toshiba also plans to commercialize a 2-gigabit flash memory by combining two 1-gigabit chips. Samples are expected to be available in October at $142, and mass production to begin at the end of this year, Toshiba says.