Samsung Shipping High-Density Flash Drives for Mobile Devices

Samsung, fresh from demonstrating several new disk drives for netbooks at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, announced Jan. 13 that it is ready to ship two new high-density solid-state memory components for mobile devices.
The new NAND flash storage components-a 64GB moviNAND memory device and a 32GB micro secure digital (microSD) memory card-are designed to fit mobile handset designers’ requirements for advanced compact high-density memory.
“The 64GB embedded memory, moviNAND, and the 32GB microSD card each greatly expands the data storage density of mobile devices,” Dong-Soo Jun, Samsung executive vice president of memory marketing, said. “We see this as ushering in a new era of mobile and IT device capacity growth.”
The memory components use Samsung’s standard 32-gigabit (Gb) NAND flash. The 64GB moviNAND, which measures 1.4mm in height, consists of 16 30nm-class 32Gb MLC NAND chips and a controller. The 17-die stack was built by using 30-micron-thick chips and advanced package technology.
Thus, Samsung’s proprietary embedded memory, moviNAND, is now available in 64GB, 32GB, 16GB, 8GB and 4GB densities.
The 32GB microSD card, developed this month, stacks eight 32Gb NAND components and a card controller, Samsung said.
The industry’s highest capacity production-ready microSD card is enabled by the use of Samsung’s advanced 30nm-class 32Gb NAND flash memory technology. Previously, the highest density microSD card in production had a 16GB capacity and was based on 40nm-class 16Gb NAND. The new 32GB card is 1mm thick. The portion of the card that is inserted into a handset measures just 0.7mm in height.
According to market research firm iSuppli, the global NAND flash memory market for 32GB and higher memory cards is forecast to be 530 million units in 2010 and reach 9.5 billion units by 2013 (in 16Gb equivalent units).
The new 64GB moviNAND has been in mass production since December 2009. The 32GB microSD is now being sampled by OEMs, with mass production expected in February, Samsung said.