Samsung has leapfrogged the 25nm process technology of the Intel-Micron joint venture IMFlash by announcing it its now producing NAND flash memorychips on 20nm. Samsung says it is already shipping 20nm chips incorporated in memory cards to customers.
IM Flash said it had started sampling 25nm 8GB (64Gbit) chips last February and said, at the time, it would move into volume production on 20nm in Q2 2010.
"In just one year after initiating 30nm-class NAND production, Samsung has made available the next generation node 20nm-class NAND,” says Soo-In Chong president of Samsung’s memory division. Samsung Electronics first began producing 32Gb NAND with 30nm-class process technology in March 2009.
The 10MB/sec write speed of an 8GB card on 20nm is 30% faster than the write speed of an 8GB card built on chips using 30nm technology, says Samsung. The read speed on a 20nm 8GB card is 20MB/sec. Samsung will use the 20nm process to produce chips going into memory cards from 4GB density through to 64GB.
The IM Flash 64Gbit chip has a 167mm²die size and fits into an industry-standard, thin small-outline package (TSOP). By stacking 32GB chips, a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD) can be produced. For a 32GB smartphone only four 8GB die are needed needs and a 16GB flash card requires only two.
In Q309, according to iSuppli, Intel had 6.1% of the worldwide NAND flash market, Micron had 7.7%, Numonyx (now owned by Micron) had 2.3%, Hynix had 10% but the lion's share was held by Toshiba with 34% and Samsung with 39%.