Sandisk and Toshiba fall back to 56nm process

DEVELOPING NEW MANUFACTURING processes always poses a big challenge. Intel and AMD may now be shipping tons of CPUs at 65nm, but the industry mostly relies on 90nm (all of console CPUs are currently manufactured only in 90nm SOI process).

When it comes to flash, there are some differences, but mostly we're talking about 5-10nm up from the chip manufacturing process. For instance, both AMD and Intel today ship 65nm CPU wafers, while Samsung is manufacturing gazillions of flash chips manufactured on a 70nm process. Next step for the CPUs is 45nm, while flash manufacturers will settle for between 50 and 56nm.

While Samsung announced 16-Gigabit NAND flash media manufactured at 50nm (for use in solid state drives), SanDisk and Toshiba are preparing new, denser MLC NAND chips manufactured on a 56nm process. Originally, Tosh and SanDisk planned to use a 52nm process in Tosh's Fab 3 factory in Yokkaichi, but technical issues forced these two companies to settle for a notch up, to 56nm.

Sampling of first-gen 8-Gigabit chips is available now, with mass production coming at the end of Q1, but Q2 will bring fireworks with expected monolithic 16-Gigabit NAND chips. This new storage enables cellphone and PDA manufacturers to offer their products with one or two Gigabytes of local storage, and bundling SD cards with map data alongside GPS devices could be the thing of the past, with local memory offering enough capacity for most countries. Samsung verses Toshiba/SanDisk is shaping up to be one interesting fight. µ