Friday, 28 July 2006

Samsung Releases 8GB NAND Flash Memory

Samsung Electronics has developed two different types of MultiMediaCard (MCC), which it claims has higher density and performance than existing cards. Samsung said one card is based on its multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory and the other is based on single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash.

MMCplus card based on the 8 GB NAND flash memory device will provide more affordable storage density for consumer and mobile applications such as mobile phones, MP3 players and gaming consoles. It cans store 2,000 MP3 music files or eight hours of DVD-quality movies.

Samsung also said it is introducing a higher performance MMC that more than triples the performance of conventional small-form-factor memory cards. The higher performance version makes use of SLC NAND flash memory, providing a read-speed of 40Mbytes/s and a write-speed of 25Mbytes/s.

Samsung currently leads the NAND Flash Memory market with more than 50 percent market share. However, Intel recently launched a 4 gigabit (Gb) NAND flash technology on memory built on 50 nanometer (nm) process technology, which according to analyst are a threat to Samsung.

Samsung's new high-density and high-performance MMCplus cards are expected to be available in the second half of this year.