NAND

South Korea's SK Hynix said it had completed the first phase of its acquisition of Intel's NAND flash memory chip business, after it received regulatory nods from eight countries including China.In exchange, SK Hynix will pay $7 billion (roughly Rs. 52213.07 crore) out of the deal's total $9 billion (roughly Rs. 67131.09 crore) price tag, the world's second-largest memory chip maker said in a statement on Thursday.The deal, signed in 2020, will allow Intel to focus on its smaller but more lucrative Optane memory business.…

South Korea's major semiconductor companies, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix hold more than 70 percent of the smartphone memory chip market.According to Strategy Analytics on July 8, global smartphone DRAM and NAND flash sales in the first quarter of this year were estimated at $11.5 billion (roughly Rs. 91,300 crore).Samsung Electronics topped the market with a 46 percent share. Samsung's market share was 52 percent in the smartphone DRAM market and 39 percent in the NAND flash market, ranking first in both markets.…

The new Apple 13-inch MacBook base model with M2 chip is reportedly having slower SSD read/write speeds than its M1 predecessor.According to a MacRumors report, YouTubers Max Tech and Created Tech tested the 256GB base M2 model worth the $1,299 and discovered the SSD's read speeds are around 50% slower than M1 MacBook Pro with same storage. The SSD's write speeds are also reportedly around 30 per cent slower."Max Tech even disassembled the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro and found that Apple is only using a single NAND flash…

Manufacturers of NAND flash memory have always tried to increase the storage density of their memory devices by increasing the number of bits stored per cell. While fundamentally, this is the most challenging way of increasing recording densities, it is also the most rewarding one from a cost standpoint. Companies like Kioxia are constantly experimenting with the number of bits they can store in one cell. This year the company said it had managed to store seven bits per cell (7 bpc), albeit in the lab and under low…

Micron has introduced two new inexpensive M.2-2280 SSD families aimed at budget PCs. But while Micron's Crucial P3 Plus and P3 SSDs are meant to be reasonably priced, they still promise capacities of up to 4TB and rather serious sequential read performance of up to 5,000 MB/s. Micron's Crucial P3 drives feature a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface as well as sequential read/write speeds of up to 3500/3000 MB/s, which is very close to what flagship PCIe Gen3 drives tend to offer. Micron's Crucial P3 Plus SSDs use a PCIe 4.0 x4…

Western Digital this week gave a sneak peek at its BiCS 3D NAND roadmap for the next few years. As expected, the company and its partner Kioxia will continue to introduce new generations of its BiCS memory increasing per-device capacity and lowering per-bit costs.Furthermore, the company is developing its BiCS+ 3D NAND that will substantially increase performance and density compared to regular BiCS memory to enable ultra-high-capacity SSDs with extreme performance.162-Layer BiCS6 IncomingThe company's next step is…

Micron on Thursday announced the industry's first 3D NAND memory device featuring 232 layers. The company plans to use its new 232-layer 3D NAND products for a variety of products, including solid-state drives and plans to start ramping up production of such chips sometimes in late 2022. Micron's 232-layer 3D NAND device features a 3D TLC architecture and has a raw capacity of 1Tb (128GB). The chip is based around Micron's CMOS under array (CuA) architecture and uses NAND string stacking technique to build two arrays of…