Smaller storage
US DRAM maker Micron has announced the latest fruit of its NAND flash joint venture with Intel. It's a new multi-level cell NAND technology that uses a 34 nanometre manufacturing process and manages to get three bits-per-cell instead of the usual two.
What all this should mean is even more flash storage in even less space. While one result might be yet smaller USB flash drives, it's hard to see how they could get much smaller than this recent launch from Buffalo.
Where this kind of technology is likely to be really useful will be in handheld devices, both as embedded storage and in external storage like micro-SD cards. The new technology claims to produce the smallest and most cost-effective currently available 32-gigabit chip.
"We see 3bpc NAND technology as an important piece of our roadmap," said Brian Shirley, VP of Micron's memory group. "Today's announcement further highlights that Micron and Intel have made great strides in 34-nanometer NAND, and we look forward to introducing our 2xnm technology later this year."
Incidentally, Intel has also released a firmware fix for its SSDs, which you can access here.
