Samsung Electronics announced that it has begun mass producing 1.8-inch solid state drives (SSD) in 64GB capacity for mobile computing applications.
This 64GB SSD consists of 64 8Gb single-level cell (SLC) flash memory chips, which are fabricated under a 51nm process. Samsung highlighted that the circuitry size of 51nm-made flash is only 1/2500 of the width of a human hair. Besides greater reliability, faster boot times and faster application start-up times than hard disk drives, Samsung said SSD can also improve battery life by up to 20% in notebooks.
Company flash marketing director Jim Elliott highlighted that Samsung is seeing sharply increasing interest in SSDs among OEMs worldwide amid a growing push to launch premium SSD-based notebooks, particularly in the ultra-mobile category. Over the next three years, 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SSDs will also gain a great deal of momentum for widespread use in standard notebooks and desktop PCs, respectively, the company noted.
Rapid expansion of the 1.8-inch SSD market will spark demand for even smaller SSD formats to be used in mobile consumer electronics. The miniaturization of SSDs will give rise to new types of digital products. Samsung has already introduced 32GB SSDs into ultra-mobile personal computers (UMPCs). Besides PC, the company sees SSD demand also coming from server applications and other digital consumer products such as camcorders, PDAs and printers, which can now be equipped with SSDs ranging from 4GB to 64GB.
Samsung expects that sales of SSD units will increase rapidly industry-wide between now and 2010 by 270% to become the largest growth segment in the NAND flash industry.
Samsung already shipping 64GB SSD in volume
Photo: Company
