Samsung Ships Samples of New NAND Flash

The company's MoviNAND combines flash memory, a multimedia card controller and firmware in 1GB and 2GB packages, useful for MP3 players and cell phones.

Samsungs semiconductor division announced Sept. 5 that it is shipping 1GB and 2GB samples of MoviNAND—an embedded combination of NAND flash memory, a multimedia card controller and onboard firmware—to some of its mobile-product OEMs.

"MoviNAND solves a dilemma faced by many of our mobile customers: how to put a large amount of NAND flash in a small space behind a standardized, high-speed serial interface," said Don Barnetson, Samsungs director of flash marketing.

MoviNAND satisfies all of the major architectural concerns of mobile device designers with its high speed, high capacity and extremely small form factor, Barnetson said.

MoviNAND is smaller than most competing devices being marketed and takes advantage of its high-performance multimedia card interface to provide the mobile data processing possible at 52MB per second.

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As an embedded memory card, Samsungs MoviNAND makes it unnecessary to have an external memory card slot in mobile devices. Another option is to use the embedded flash with a removable MMC card to provide a virtually unlimited amount of storage capacity, Barnetson said.

"As consumers look for increasing volumes of embedded storage in MP3 players and media-player cell phones, products that offer large NAND capacity while simplifying NAND interfaces will see a significant increase in demand," said Jim Handy, director of Nonvolatile Memory Services at Semico Research, in Phoenix.

Semico sees a large potential market for devices such as MoviNAND, a market it estimates will grow as large as $4 billion worldwide by 2010, Handy said.

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MoviNAND was devised through cooperative work of Samsungs memory division and its System LSI division.

A Samsung spokesperson said mass production of MoviNAND in 1GB and 2GB densities starts in September. The company, based in Seoul, South Korea, will further add 512MB and 4GB densities by the end of 2006, the spokesperson said.

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