Toshiba and SanDisk Trumpet World's Smallest 128Gb NAND Flash Memory Chip

Posted 02/23/2012 at 6:55am | by Paul Lilly

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Teams of engineers from SanDisk and Toshiba working at SanDisk's Milpitas campus developed a NAND flash memory chip smaller than a U.S. penny, the two companies announced. The 128Gb (gigabit) memory chip, which is currently in production, is the world's smallest and can store 128 billion bits of information on a single die measuring just 170mm2, barely more than a quarter of an inch squared.

"Building a 128Gb NAND flash memory chip with this level of complexity is an incredible achievement," said Mehrdad Mofidi, vice president, Memory Design. "This innovation allows SanDisk to continue to be a leader in helping our customers deliver smaller, more powerful products capable of doing more at lower cost."

Advances like this one will lead to even smaller and more powerful mobile devices, and in particular smartphones, tablet PCs, and solid state drives (SSDs), SanDisk says. The brains at SanDisk and Toshiba developed the 128Gb NAND flash memory chip using a 19nm process technology. To put that into perspective, SanDisk says you could fit 3,000 circuit lines across the width of a human hair when you get down to 19nm.

The memory chip also boasts X3 write performance of 18MB/s courtesy of SanDisk's patented advanced all bit line (ABL) architecture.