Samsung Develops 16Gb Flash Memory

nofrance writes "As promised earlier this year, Samsung has unveiled the world's first 16-gigabit flash memory chip. These chips, when combined in a 16x16 configurations, will allow 32 GigaByte flash cards. Using 50-nanometer manufacturing technology, these chips will be in production by the second half of 2006, with Samsung promising that their 32Gb team will impress next year." From the article: "According to the company, the cell size of the fingernail-sized flash chip has been reduced about 25 percent from that of the 60 nm 8 Gbit NAND: The new 50 nm flash memory contains cells that measure 0.00625 square microns per bit. The 16 Gbit device holds 16.4 billion functional transistors, Samsung said. "

Comments

Re:Sounds good for cell phones

[ergo98]

Never has a rush for a quasi-legitimate first post been more transparent. Would this "type of memory" be good for my digital camera? Why yes, it would! How about for USB keys! OMG, it would there too!

Of course the storage size issue really isn't that huge of an issue anymore - I have an inexpensive 1GB flash card in my 8MP digital camera, and I always transfer pictures for other reasons before I do it to clear space. This will eventually put downward pressure on the smaller capacities, but already they're low enough that it isn't a huge issue.

The real question is what new markets will open up as Flash memory super-sizes - will we replace our laptop hard drives anytime soon? Would we want to?

Re: Yes & No!

[TheRaven64]

I might be missing something here. 16Gb is 2GB. There are 2GB flash chips already shipping in the iPod Nano. This is the first 2GB flash chip. Either this is very old news, or the important thing is the size of the chip rather than the fact it exists.