Samsung Samples Industry's First 50nm 16Gb Flash Memory

By Divya Narain

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Samsung (News - Alert) Electronics Co. Ltd., a global leader in semiconductor technology innovation, has announced that it is sampling its 16-gigabit (Gb) NAND flash memory with customers. The chip has the distinction of being the industry’s first NAND flash memory powered by 50 nanometer (nm) process technology.

The samples of Samsung’s high-density memory chip feature a multi-level cell (MLC) design with a 4Kbyte (KB) page size, a significant improvement over the 2KB paging system. The multi-level-design ensures greater capacity into a given die size. This functionality leads to an enhancement in both read and write performance of the chip; while the read speed is doubled, the write performance is augmented one and a half times.

With an almost two-fold improvement over previous flash chip generations, Samsung's MLC NAND provides mobile customers with speedier data transfer while storing or reading large data files. This is irrespective of whether the customers are employing external memory cards or handsets with integrated flash solutions like Samsung's moviNAND.


The advent of the 16Gb NAND flash memory will usher in a new era of non-volatile memory applications like flash-based solid state disks.

Mass production of the memory is expected to commence in the next few months.

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Divya Narain is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.