Osram Opto Semiconductors GmbH of Regensburg, Germany has added to its Oslux family with a new LED designed specifically for the camera flash in smartphones, providing a high-quality white light that illuminates the target area.

Spansion's five-year technology roadmap includes 1Gb-8Gb SLC NAND solutions on 4Xnm technology today, 3Xnm technology by end of 2012 and 2Xnm in 2014.

Sandisk's first quarter results were messy and the outlook wasn't much better. The problem: Sandisk is making all the wrong moves and focusing on the wrong customers in the flash memory market.

When Apple launched the iPod nano, it attracted plenty of attention. While consumers swooned over its sleek design, analysts were more likely to hail it as a turning point for the storage industry.

Intel and Micron Technology have entered into agreements to expand their NAND flash memory joint venture relationship. The agreements include a NAND flash supply agreement for Micron to supply NAND products to Intel and agreements for certain joint venture assets to be sold to Micron.

"Industry experts - even the best ones - are often shortsighted, and sometimes outright wrong," said Eli Harari at ISSCC on Monday. "And therefore, perseverance in the face of naysayers sometimes does pay off. And in the case of NAND, big-time."

Flash memory vendor SanDisk is looking for a director of processing engineering management for a 3-D resistive RAM team based in Milpitas. A job ad for the position was posted in SanDisk's website dated Feb. 15, 2012.

Micron Technology and Virtensys have announced that the companies have signed an agreement for Micron to acquire the assets of privately held Virtensys, a provider of PCIe-sharing solutions based in Manchester, England and Beaverton, Ore.

"We delivered a solid fourth quarter amid challenging market conditions," said company president and CEO John Kispert. "2011 was a year of transition and intense product development. Spansion is now well-positioned for growth in the future in areas such as automotive, industrial, communications and gaming..."

Marvell Friday launched what it's calling the industry's first PCI Express (PCIe) NAND flash controller, which it describes as a building block that allows solid state drive (SSD) and system manufacturers to scale products up or down in capacity and performance using commodity hardware.

The acquisition is one of the most expensive for Apple since it acquired NeXT in 1996 - 15 years ago to the day, in fact-and should cement the company's strategic shift to solid-state flash storage for its products.

Apple is reportedly going to use part of its enormous pile of cash to buy an Israeli fabless semiconductor company that specializes in flash storage solutions.

20nm seems to be the new cutting-edge process for memory production, but Intel and Micron might be surprised to find Hynix has just surpassed them. The Korean manufacturer has used the IEDM to announce it has managed to manufacture middle-1Xnm-generation NAND flash.

iFixit's teardown shows an abundance of TI silicon, with flash memory storage and system memory from Samsung and Hynix, respectively.

The firm unveiled the chip at a recent exhibition hosted by the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.

Flash memory provider Spansion said it would cut 750 jobs, 610 of which will come from closing down its Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, facility by the end of the first quarter of fiscal 2012.

Flush from better-than-expected third quarter revenues, flash memory supplier SanDisk is buying back up to US$500 million of its stock over the next five years, joining a growing list of companies putting their cash to use to help build investor confidence.

LSI will not limit the distribution of SandForce's flash chip controller technology, even to competitors, after its buyout of the company is completed. LSI's planned acquisition of SandForce was announced on October 26.

Shares of flash memory chip maker Spansion are taking a beating Friday after the company disclosed weaker-than-expected 3Q11 results and highly disappointing guidance for the fourth quarter.

Viking Technology has launched the ArxCis-NVTM DRAM memory module, which the company said can automatically detect I/O interrupts and back up data to NAND flash prior to an outage.

Fusion-io has released the first upgrade to its in-server NAND flash card, the ioDrive2, doubling the card's speed, bandwidth and density, while maintaining its resiliency and endurance.

"We have a lot of big plans for it and we're working with Hynix Semiconductor to launch a replacement for flash in the summer of 2013 and also to address the solid-state drive market," said Stan Williams, senior fellow at HP Labs.

The Veolo is AC Ryan's version of the LG Smart TV Upgrader and is powered by Android 2.2 (Froyo). Key smart TV functions include a full Web browser with Flash and HTML5 support, as well as downloadable apps, games and widgets from the AndroidPIT app center.

While many experts have expressed doubts about the ability of flash memory to scale and indicated the need for an alternative non-volatile memory technology, Hynix has just gone ahead and produced a 15nm NAND flash memory cell which it plans to unveil at this year's International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM).

Texas Memory Systems, best known for its pricey, yet extremely high-performance NAND flash-based storage arrays, has introduced a new system that it said competes with Tier 1 hard drives on a price-per-gigabyte basis.

SandForce has announced the first public demonstration of its SSD controllers working in concert with Toshiba's 24nm MLC NAND flash for SSD applications. SandForce also revealed that to data, it has shipped well over two million SSD controllers.

Toshiba President Norio Sasaki also said the company is gaining on South Korea's Samsung Electronics in terms of flash memory global market share, though warned that the rivalry could undercut prices.

IBM has solved two related problems with phase-change memory and now says the fast next-generation data-storage technology will be ready for use in 2016 in servers.

IM Flash Technologies, the NAND flash memory joint venture between Intel and Micron Technology, is expanding its operations in Lehi, Utah, and adding 200 jobs, according to a statement issued Monday (June 20) by Utah's Governor and the state's economic development office.

Code-named Lyndonville, the 710 will be available in 100GB, 200GB, and 300GB capacities, and use MLC NAND flash storage. The 720 Series, or Ramsdale, will be the first Intel SSD line to use PCI Express (at least a PCIe x8 slot) as the interface instead of SATA...

Spansion has entered production of its 1Gb and 512Mb GL NOR flash memory for automotive, consumer electronics, gaming and telnet applications.

Shares of NAND flash drive maker SanDisk are off by US$1.68, or 3.4%, at US$47.31 after the company reported revenue and earnings per share for 1Q slightly ahead of expectations and said Japan's disaster would not derail its earnings outlook for the year.

Intel and Micron Technology will make an announcement about NAND flash on April 14. The companies have not disclosed the details. "I believe that they will announce the finalization of their Singapore agreement-IMFS-that will bring up 25nm first and then 20nm later," said Alan Niebel, CEO of Web-Feet Research.

IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), Intel and Micron's joint venture, released 25 nanometer (nm) circuitry a little over a year ago. In the next few weeks, IMFT plans to annouce 20nm NAND flash chip production.

SanDisk expects tablet sales will increase from 17 million units in 2010 to nearly 205 million units by 2014. The firm also estimates the flash based storage per device (SSD storage) will more than triple during the same period from 31 Gb/unit in 2010 to 96 Gb/unit in 2014.

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association has announced a broad spectrum of ongoing standards development work related to 3D-ICs.

Fusion-io, a maker of NAND flash memory cards that enhance the performance of data center servers, has announced that it plans an initial public offering it hopes can raise US$150 million.

"Hard disk drives will serve the bulk of the laptop market for many years to come as makers of solid state drives remain overstretched to meet ever-growing demand for laptop storage..."