Samsung Shipping Samples of New High-capacity NAND Solution to Mobile Customers

September 5, 2006

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced today that it is now shipping 1 and 2 gigabyte (GB) samples of moviNANDTM- an embedded combination of NAND flash memory, a multimedia card (MMC) controller and onboard firmware -- to leading manufacturers of mobile products.

“moviNAND solves a dilemma faced by many of our mobile customers – how to put a large amount of NAND flash in a small space behind a standardized, high speed serial interface,” said Don Barnetson, Director, Flash Marketing, Samsung Semiconductor.

moviNAND satisfies all of the major architectural concerns of mobile device designers with its high-speed, high capacity and extremely small form factor. moviNAND is smaller than competing devices being marketed and takes advantage of its high-performance MMC (multimedia card) interface to provide the fastest mobile data processing possible at 52 megabytes per second.

As an embedded memory card, Samsung's moviNAND makes it unnecessary to have an external memory card slot in mobile devices. Another option is to use the embedded flash with a removable MMC card to enable a virtually unlimited amount of higher storage capacity.

Samsung said mass production of moviNAND in 1 and 2 GB densities starts this month. The company will further add 512MB and 4GB densities by the end of this year.

"As consumers look for increasing volumes of embedded storage in MP3 players and media-player cell phones, products that offer large NAND capacity while simplifying NAND interfaces will see a significant increase in demand," said Jim Handy, Director of Nonvolatile Memory Services at Semico Research. Semico sees a very large potential market for such devices including moviNAND, a market it estimates will grow as large as $4 billion worldwide by 2010.

moviNAND was devised through cooperative work of Samsung's memory division and its System LSI division.

Source: Samsung