January 25, 2007 – Toshiba Corp. and SanDisk Corp. say they have developed 16Gb (2GB) and 8Gb (1GB) NAND flash memory fabricated with 56nm process technologies, achieving the highest density single-chip NAND flash memory available.
The 16Gb version enables twice the memory density per chip as with previous 8Gb devices built with 70nm process technologies. Write performance is 10MB/sec, twice as fast as the company’s current MLC products. One-time write page size is also doubled to 4314 bytes, while a write-cache function shortens data processing standby, realizing short write cycle times.
Limited engineering samples were produced at year’s end, and the company is now increasing shipments of commercial samples of new 8Gb single-chip, multilevel cell NAND flash. Commercial samples of 16Gb NAND flash are slated for later this quarter.