Spansion, the NOR flash market leader, is heading into the NAND market with a new product it calls ORNAND2.

Asked if it was mad to enter the over-supplied, price-diving NAND market, Bertrand Cambou, CEO of Spansion, told EW:

“Yes. For all those fighting for the high end applications like SSDs, and MP3, MP4 flash cards, this is mad. But we’re going for very high quality NAND for use in handsets,” said Cambou.

By this, Cambou means he will be addressing the NAND market in handsets with a single-level cell (SLC) technology which uses a 1.8V power supply, instead of the 3V used by MLC NAND, and has a fast read speed and fast write (6-8Mbyte-per-second) speed compared to MLC, and a higher number of read/write cycles (100k cycles compared to 30k cycles for MLC).

So Spansion’s NAND offering will be a superior product. “Compared with best-in-class NAND it will be cheaper and the die size will be slightly less,” said Cambou.

When Spansion starts making ORNAND2 on 43nm next year, it will be producing parts between 1Gbit and 4Gbit in density but there will be options for stacking. “We can, realistically, stack up to five die in a package, so we might put in three ORNAND2 dies, a NOR and a DRAM,” said John Nation, Spansion’s corporate marketing, “though, in theory, the industry can go much higher.”

Although the MLC NAND densities are up to 16Gbit and will be 32Gbit next year, Spansion believes it will be delivering the densities and capabilities the handset industry wants to use Nation said: “We’re not addressing all the market but we’re addressing nearly all of the market.”

The beauty for Spansion of its NAND strategy is that it already has nearly 40% of the NOR market, so it can go to existing customers and pitch for a NAND slot as well.