Winbond Electronics has announced an expansion of its flash product portfolio with the introduction of a family of stackable SpiFlash memory devices. The new SpiStack W25M Series is Winbond's first to allow the "stacking" of homogeneous or heterogeneous flash, thus achieving memories of varying densities for code and/or data storage, while providing designers with the flash solutions most appropriate for their design requirements. The Winbond SpiStack W25M series provides a wide range of densities in the well-established 8-pin package to which designers are accustomed. Additionally, W25M memories feature the popular, multi-IO SpiFlash interface and command set. SpiStack homogeneous memories are achieved by stacking SpiFlash dies. For example, two 256Mb dies combining to form a single SpiFlash 512Mb NOR memory in the industry-standard 8-pin 8x6mm WSON package. Winbond's stacked product, W25M512JV, is also available in the widely used 16-pin SOIC or 24-pad BGA packages and is sampling now. SpiStack heterogeneous memories call for the stacking of a NOR memory with a NAND die, such as a 64Mb SpiFlash NOR blended with a 1Gb Serial NAND die, which gives designers the flexibility to store code in the NOR die and data in the NAND memory. Winbond's SpiFlash memory devices are manufactured at the company's 12-inch wafer fabrication facility in Taichung, Taiwan.

Micron Technology has announced the sampling of its 16nm, 128Gb MLC NAND flash memory devices, designed for applications like SSDs, USB drives and flash memory cards, tablets, ultra-thin devices and data center cloud storage. The new 16nm, 128Gb NAND flash memory provides the greatest number of bits per square millimeter and lowest cost of any MLC device in existence, Micron claimed. With the process technology, nearly 6TB of storage could now be created on a single wafer, Micron disclosed. Micron is sampling the 16nm, 128Gb MLC NAND with select partners and plans to be in full production by the fourth quarter of 2013. The company added it is also developing a new line of SSDs based on 16nm MLC NAND chips and expects to ship those devices in 2014.

KLA-Tencor has announced the new 2910 series optical wafer defect inspection platform with NanoPoint technology and the new eDR-7100 electron-beam wafer defect review system. Meeting IC manufacturers' need for accelerated defect sourcing on advanced devices, these two tools combine increased speed with seamless connectivity to find and identify defects that inhibit yield and reliability. The 2910 series' improved defect capture and the eDR-7100's enhanced review resolution have been demonstrated by detecting and imaging unique defects located at the bottom of three-dimensional or vertical pattern structures such as FinFETs. Multiple 2910 series optical inspection tools, configured as either the 2910 or 2915, and eDR-7100 e-beam review tools have been installed at leading IC manufacturers where they are being used for new technology development and ramp, according to the company.