Spansion, with its technology development partner Saifun of Israel, is developing six bit-per-cell and eight bit-per-cell flash memory.
This will be utilised, alongside its already commercialised four bit-per-cell technology, which it calls Quadbit, to produce very small die size memories to provide an inexpensive medium for content delivery.
“We’re moving to six bit-per-cell and eight bit-per-cell," Bertrand Cambou, CEO of Spansion, told
EW, “we tell Saifun: ‘Don’t worry about increasing the number of cycles but increase the packing density’.”
The limitation of multiple bits-per-cell technology is that it has a severely reduced number of programming/erase cycles.
Quadbit can only handle ten programming cycles, which is fine for delivering content such as music, but obviously unsuitable for solid state drives (SSDs) and flash cards.
Spansion develops its Quadbit densities to precisely fit particular applications, and is making its chips in densities of between 256Mbit and 2Gbit.
“Content delivery is all about very low-cost solutions which means very small die sizes,” said John Nation, director of corporate marketing at Spansion.
Quadbit is currently being made by Spansion on 65nm processes, but Quadbit chips will be moved onto a 45nm process next year.