SanDisk and Toshiba talked about their upcoming NAND Flash chips at International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The two companies announced development of 32Gb X3 memory chips and 64Gb X4 memory chips, which will provide increased capacity while reducing the size of memory chip.
The 32Gb X3 on 32nm technology is the smallest NAND flash memory die ever made. It is the highest density microSD memory die in the worlds, providing twice the capacity of a microSD chip on 43nm while maintaining a similar die size. In X3 technology three bits of data are stored in each memory cell. SanDisk and Toshiba will quickly bring the new technology to the market enabling greater capacities and reduce manufacturing costs for products ranging from memory cards to Solid State Drive. The new technology will allow SanDisk to make microSD card with 32GB capacity.
The two company also disclosed development of X4 technology that will pack four bits of data in each memory cell, allowing up to 64 GB storage on flash memory cards. By using X4 technology SanDisk will be able to produce chips with 64Gb capacity, which is 8GB per chip. Normally, a single memory stack has around 8 chips, which will bring total storage to 64GB for a single stack. This will double the storage capacity of memory cards from current maximum of 32GB to 64GB. The memory chips based on X4 technology will ship by end of first half of 2009.