SanDisk has announced that it has developed the world’s smallest 128GB NAND flash memory chip. The chip is smaller than the area covered by a South African five cent coin.
Shrinkingnthe size of NAND flash memory allows smaller, more powerful computing, communicationsnand consumer electronics devices to be built while keeping costs low.
SanDisknbuilt the 128GB NAND flash memory chip on the company’s 19 nanometer (nm)nprocess technology. The chip also employs SanDisk’s three-bit per cell (X3)ntechnology that allows the company to build NAND flash memory products with thenability to read and write three bits of information in each memory cell.
Atn19nm, SanDisk is deploying its ninth generation of multi-level cell (MLC) NANDnproducts and fifth generation of X3 technology. This combination ofnmanufacturing and technical expertise helps SanDisk pack more information intoneach memory cell making it possible to create a smaller, denser NAND flashnmemory chip.
“Buildingna 128GB NAND flash memory chip with this level of complexity is an incrediblenachievement,” said Mehrdad Mofidi, vice president, Memory Design.
Innaddition to reduced size, the 128GB flash drive has an write performance of 18nmegabytes (MB) per second. This level of performance is achieved usingnSanDisk’s patented advanced all bit line (ABL) architecture.
Then128GB NAND flash memory chip was developed jointly by teams from SanDisk andnToshiba at SanDisk’s Milpitas campus. The effort was led by Yan Li, director ofnMemory Design at SanDisk. Products based on the 128GB three-bit per cellntechnology began shipping late last year and have already started to rampninto high volume production. SanDisk has also developed a derivative product basednon the success of the 128GB chip – a 64GB, X3 NAND flash memory chip that isncompatible with the industry-standard microSD format. The company has alsonstarted to increase production of this additional chip technology.
NANDnflash memory is the technology behind the high reliability, small form factornstorage solutions that SanDisk sells to OEM customers for use in a wide varietynof products such as smartphones, tablets and ultrabooks. It is also thentechnology used in products SanDisk sells through its retail channel in thenform of imaging and mobile cards, USB drives and mp3 players.
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