Toshiba Corporation and SanDisk Corporation announced on Feb. 7 (2005) an 8-gigabit (Gb) or 1GB NAND flash memory chip fabricated with 70-nanometer (nm) process technology that ushers in the new era of gigabyte chips: 1-gigabyte data storage capacity on a single chip. Performance is maximized by adoption of fast writing circuit techniques, which reduce data write times and support a fast write speed of 6-megabytes per second. Read speed of 60MB/sec.
Insight: It’s amazing to see the advances in flash technology. This announcement is a breakthrough of sorts because it puts the “G” word – “gigabyte” – into the equation for solid-state flash storage. We’ll soon see sub-$100 prices for a GB of flash storage. It causes you to ask the question, “How much storage is enough for the application?” In digital cameras, for example, 5-6MP (megapixels) should be enough image density for most users. This takes around 2MB to store in JPEG format. At 1GB, that’s 500 pictures on an (SD, MMC, MemoryStick) card, more than most people take in a week’s vacation. Higher Flash storage capacities will begin to address the camcorder market. It takes around 40GB to store an hour of video. Someday, camcorders will migrate from tape to Flash, but that’s still years off to make that much solid state storage affordable. A small 1” Microdrive will likely get their first but someday, solid state storage will be used in camcorders (or should we say the camcorder function in a future digital camera since stills and digital movies will be integrated into the same camera).
