Exactly a year after it got into the NAND Flash business, Micron on Dec. 2 launched a new, powerful and tightly packed 25-nanometer multilevel cell processor that may give the company an inside track on the current flash storage market.
ClearNAND, as Micron has dubbed it, will come in both Standard and Enhanced versions. Standard will feature storage capacities of 8GB and 32GB; Enhanced ClearNAND has between 16GB and 64GB of storage capacity.
The new chip will be used by device and systems manufacturers for embedded applications in handheld devices, enterprise-level servers, tablet computers, MP3 players, digital cameras, security cameras and many others.
Micron makes NAND Flash for host processors built by its partner semiconductor firms that include Intel, the world’s largest chip maker. With each iteration of its chip, Micron adds more capacity, enabling products and applications to have more functionality.
The NAND flash market has continued to see a significant downward trend in the size of its chips. Boise, Idaho-based Micron, which competes with companies such as Samsung, WD, SanDisk, Toshiba, Seagate and others, has taken the die size down to 25nm from 72nm and above from about three years ago.
Eventually, all nanotechnology has to face its limits, and Micron and others have said that NAND flash processing will be approaching that wall in about five years.