Seoul (Korea) – While its possible successor technologies have been discussed for years, flash continues to scale extremely well: Samsung says it has developed the first 30 nm chip, providing a 64 Gb capacity – four times of what is being offered by the highest capacity mass-production chips today.

Wafer containing 30 nm NAND flash chips

The companies latest flash chips are claimed to be the first multi-level cell (MLC) 64 Gbit NAND flash chips. Using a 30 nm production technology, one of these chips represents a capacity of 8 GB, while a memory card (such as SD or CF-II) using 16 of these MLC chips can store a whopping 128 GB of data. 1.8” solid state disks using 64 of the 30 nm chips could store 512 GB.  

128 GB memory cards are not just impressive because they would provide enough room for 32,000 music files or 80 DVD movies, it is also beyond what is currently considered to be the mainstream of hard drive storage capacity in notebooks - 80 GB. Even more interesting: According to Samsung, this technology isn’t science-fiction. The company plans to put these 64 Gb chips into mass production by 2009.

64 Gb NAND flash packages

In April of this year, Samsung put 51 nm NAND flash in 8 Gb single-level cell (SLC) and 16 Gb MLC versions into mass production, doubling the capacity of the 60 nm 8 Gb MLC that had been introduced to mass production in August of 2006.   

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