Though Toshiba announced its preparations for sub-25 nanometer process flash memory production earlier this month, its first SD cards are only expected to arrive by 2012. The wait might seem long, but it’s actually not going to be so bad, as Samsung has taken up the mantle in the meanwhile, announcing its own brand of ultra-dense 20-nm flash memory cards that will hit the market by the end of this year.
Already in the sampling stages, Samsung’s production of the 20-nm speed-class rated 10 (20MBps read, 10MBps write) SD cards is based on its 32Gigabit MLC NAND (Multi-Level Cell NAND) flash memory technology. The company will offer embedded memory solutions as well as SD cards at densities ranging from 4GB to 64GB, at rates that are expected to be cheaper than its current-gen 30-nm MLC SD cards due to the fact that productivity will be 50% higher than earlier.
Mr. Soo-In Cho (President, Memory Division, Samsung Electronics) had this to say about the new chips in the company’s press release: “In just one year after initiating 30nm-class NAND production, Samsung has made available the next generation node 20nm-class NAND, which exceeds most customers requirements for high-performance, high-density NAND-based solutions… The new 20nm-class NAND is not only a significant step forward in process design, but we have incorporated advanced technologies into it to enable substantial performance innovation.”