Spansion Inc., a leading provider of parallel and serial NOR Flash memory, today announced it has entered volume production of its 512 Mb Spansion FL-S Serial (SPI) NOR Flash memory featuring the highest-density single-die serial Flash.

The Spansion FL-S family spans from 128 Mb to 1 Gb and features an industry-leading programming speed that is three times faster than competing solutions and has 20% faster double data rate (DDR) read performance. The speed improvements are key to enriching the user experience for a growing range of embedded applications, such as automotive instrument clusters and infotainment systems, industrial and medical graphic displays as well as home networking gateways and set-top boxes.

PNY Technologies, Inc. ("PNY") is considered a leading designer, manufacturer and a worldwide leader in DRAM Memory and Flash Memory products, has introduced the new HP v165w Flash drive of their HP authorized line. HP v165w offers durable and easy transfer of files. The HP v165w is encased in a blue shell and transparent design that gives a futuristic and edgy look to it.

The small and compact size makes it a convenient and portable storage device and enables user to plug and use it anytime and anywhere.

Intel Corporation and Micron Technology, Inc., today announced that the companies have entered into agreements to expand their NAND Flash memory joint venture relationship.

The agreements, which are designed to improve the flexibility and efficiency of the joint venture, 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. Under terms of the agreement, Intel is selling its stake in two wafer factories in exchange for approximately $600 million-the approximate book value of Intel's share. Additionally, Intel will be receiving approximately half of the consideration in cash and the remaining amount will be deposited with Micron, which may be refunded or applied to Intel's future purchases under the NAND Flash supply agreement. The agreements also extend the companies' successful NAND Flash joint development program and expand it to include emerging memory technologies.

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today announced it has developed the world's smallest 128 gigabit (Gb) NAND flash memory chip currently in production. The semiconductor device can store 128 billion individual bits of information on a single silicon die 170 mm2 in size - a little more than a quarter of an inch squared, or smaller than the area covered by a U.S. penny.

The use of NAND flash memory in high tech equipment like smartphones, tablets and solid state drives (SSDs) allows advances in the full function, small form factor devices that are highly valued by consumers. Shrinking the size of NAND flash memory allows smaller, more powerful computing, communications and consumer electronics devices to be built while keeping costs low.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have concluded that solid state drives (SSDs) have a bleak future in the evolution of computing technology. They have discovered that fast flash based storage are facing come pretty glaring technology hurdles during their natural course of evolution, which they don't think it will overcome. To begin with, shrinking (miniaturizing) them, to increase capacity or decrease manufacturing costs, will severely degrade performance beyond a point, 6.5 nm silicon fab process.

The scientists studied 45 different flash chips in various sizes, which showed that scaling of latencies and error-rates are 'tolerable' enough as the technology miniaturizes only till 6.5 nm, or the year 2024, when this fab process will be common, beyond which they question the drives' viability. Beyond this point, the more capacity you squeeze into flash memory chips, the more performance degrade (latency and error-rate scale beyond tolerable scales).

PNY Technologies, Inc. ("PNY") is considered a leading designer, manufacturer and a worldwide leader in DRAM Memory and Flash Memory products, has announced the release of their elegant and stunning range of Clip Attaché USB flash drives. The Clip Attaché serves a dual purpose of an efficient storage device as well as a vanity feature to suit the pace and the trend of the metropolis lifestyle.

PNY Clip Attaché is encased in a colorful metallic case illustrated with 4 different floral designs (plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum) inspired by traditional Seiko art and is an effortless blend of modern technology and classic culture. Available in four different colors to choose from it provides a personalized selection of storage accessories.

Following the success of their v175w ice cream flash drives PNY Technologies, Inc. ("PNY") is considered a leading designer, manufacturer and a worldwide leader in DRAM Memory and Flash Memory products, introduced a new USB flash drive, the v270w. The innovative flash drive comes in an egg shaped design that gives a light-hearted and fun vibe whilst offering fast and convenient transfer of files on the go.

The HP v270w is covered in a distinctive multicolored rubber material offering water and shock resistance that protects and prevents any data loss from accidental drops or external collisions. The egg shaped cover is embossed in wavy design which provides better grip and easy disconnection. The bright use of white and sunshine yellow exudes a playful and radiant appearance.

Today at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show, iconic brand Victorinox Swiss Army (VSA), the exclusive marketer of Victorinox USB Flash Memory devices, announced the launch of two new portable storage additions - the Victorinox SSD and Victorinox Slim 3.0. VSA brings more than 125 years of trusted precision, quality, function and versatility to its newest consumer electronics innovations, which is a burgeoning product category for the brand.

The Victorinox SSD (Solid State Drive) and Victorinox Slim 3.0 USBs offer unprecedented data storage capacity with security measures fit for protecting the most confidential of personal and professional documents. Each pocket-sized device packs anywhere from 16 GB to one terabyte of storage capacity, is equipped to withstand a range of environmental and daily use factors, and remains true to the Swiss Army legacy of flawlessly designed products that endure.

Toshiba Corporation today announced the development of BENAND, a versatile, multi-application single level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory with an embedded error correction code (ECC). BENAND's diverse applications include LCD TVs and digital cameras along with robots and other industrial applications. Samples of eight BENAND products in two capacities, 4 Gigabit and 8 Gigabit, will be available from today and mass production will follow from March 2012.

The simple interface and high reliability of small capacity SLC NAND has won it wide use in consumer applications and industrial programming. Until now, the ECC has been embedded in the host processor and corrected 1 bit per 512 bytes. However, advances in memory process technology require enhanced error correction; more than 4 bit correction per 512 bytes for NAND flash fabricated with 32nm process. For NAND flash memory without ECC fabricated with 32nm and beyond, the controller in the host processor must be changed to secure the required level of correction.

PNY Technologies, Inc. ("PNY") is considered a leading designer, manufacturer and a worldwide leader in DRAM Memory and Flash Memory products, today announced the new Brick Attaché USB Flash drive. This drive sports a unique, playful and fun building block design of children's toys, steering away from the traditional serious designs associated with USB flash drives.

PNY's new Brick Attaché drive is made of strong non-slip polymer material with a dotted embossed texture. The dark blue body has a wedge-shaped notch at the end far from the white cap, while the cap has a similar shaped protrusion, which fits snugly in this notch. This prevents the cap from getting lost. Additionally, if you have more than one such drives, you can connect them one after another forming a train or any such imaginary object according to your creativity.

PNY Technologies, Inc., is considered a leading designer, manufacturer and a worldwide leader in DRAM Memory and Flash Memory products, and authorized partnership with HP since 2008. December 2011 PNY has introduced its popular line-up - the HP v240b/v240g, which is a tiny but elegant designed drive targeting mainly business people. The drive comes in no-nonsense plastic casing in classic blue and green colors. The clean design is meant to symbolize tidiness and a coherent professional feeling at the workplace.

The drive comes with a cap to protect the USB plug from dust and water. In fact, the drive is not only rugged, it is also dustproof and waterproof, with the strong polymer lending it durability and resistance to shock. The cap has a keyhole to attach a lanyard, useful to attach it to your purse, keychain, belt, etc. The COB packaging helps achieve such a small dimensions of 7 mm x 16 mm x 31 mm and just 4.2 grams, thus giving it ultra-portability.

Flash memory major Samsung announced plans to build a new flash memory plant in China to meet growing demands by mobile computing device manufacturers in the coming years. The new manufacturing plant will be built at a cost of over US $4 billion, Samsung hopes it will fuel the $22 billion flash memory industry's growth next year. When operationalised, the new flash memory plant will be Samsung's second outside South Korea.

The NAND flash memory industry is seeing exceptional growth at 20%, it will be worth $26 billion next year. President of Samsung's memory business, Jun Dong-soo, said in a statement "[The new factory] will enable us to meet fast growing demand from our customers and at the same time strengthen our overall competitiveness in the memory industry."

Memoright, a leading provider of solid state drive (SSD) products, unveils its latest SSD solutions HTM series which delivers constant sequential performance and constant random access performance and allows MLC- based SSDs to deliver longer life span for enterprise storage.

As Memoright's Chairman and CEO Eric Kao stated in the keynote speech of Flash Memory Summit, "one size does not fit all in SSD world." SSDs are not simply as a faster version of HDDs. If SSD's performance characteristic does not match data access patterns, SSDs will not perform as expected and sometimes can be slower than HDDs.

Micron Technology, Inc., today introduced the highest-density Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) NOR memory available, launching 1 gigabit (Gb), 512 megabit (Mb) and 256Mb products in both 1.8V and 3V power supply voltages. Employing state-of-the-art 65nm process technology, the N25Q product family offers the highest-speed quad I/O in the industry and a full set of advanced features and small packages that improve overall system performance and time-to-market in networking, set-top boxes, automotive and a wide range of industrial, computing and consumer applications.

Extending the company's legacy of memory leadership, Micron's new SPI NOR product line balances customers' needs for cost-effective solutions at higher densities while ensuring compatibility among future chipsets. Micron's long-term commitment to customers in the embedded markets is reinforced by Micron's Product Longevity Program (PLP) - a 10-year commitment to provide stable memory architectures for customer designs. The new N25Q products will be offered as part of this program to provide design assurance for its PLP customers.

Spansion Inc., today announced the industry's first single-die 4Gb (gigabit) NOR Flash memory product at 65nm. The 4Gb Spansion GL-S delivers high-quality and fast read performance to enable a better user experience with interactive graphics, animation and video in games and automotive applications.

The newest addition to the flagship Spansion GL-S product line is sampling this month. Based on Spansion's proprietary, highly reliable MirrorBit charge-trapping technology, the Spansion GL-S delivers the fastest read performance in the industry, up to 45 % faster read than competing NOR Flash products. The Spansion GL-S family is currently offered at 128Mb through 2Gb densities and the company is gaining design win momentum for the product family with consumer, automotive, gaming, telecom and industrial applications.

Seagate has shipped its one millionth solid state hybrid drive for laptop PCs after launching the product - Momentus XT - in spring 2010. Major computer makers including Alienware, ASUS, Dell, Sony and Toshiba now offer laptops powered by the 2.5-inch drive that blends performance rivaling solid state drives with the enormous capacity and much lower cost of hard disk drives.

The Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive, a 7200RPM drive with up to 500GB of capacity, boots up to 50 percent faster than traditional 5400RPM drives and sets new benchmarks for real-world system performance for laptops and gaming systems. Seagate's Adaptive Memory technology is key to the drive's speed, optimizing its performance by moving frequently used information into the 4GB of onboard solid state memory for faster bootup and application access.

Toshiba Corporation and SanDisk Corporation today celebrated the opening of Fab 5, the third 300mm wafer NAND fabrication facility at Toshiba's Yokkaichi Operations in Mie Prefecture, Japan.

Consumer demand for smartphones, tablets and other electronic devices continues to fuel strong global demand for NAND flash memory. Toshiba began the construction of Fab 5 in July 2010, and the new facility, equipped with manufacturing equipment funded by Toshiba and SanDisk, started volume production in July 2011. Fab 5 currently uses 24 nanometer (nm) process technology and its first wafer outs will be in August. In time, the fab will transition to more advanced process generations, starting with recently announced 19nm technology, the world's smallest, most advanced process node.

Verbatim, the global leader in data storage technology including portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs, Blu-ray discs and memory cards, packs unparalleled power, speed and reliability into its new Store 'n' Stay USB Drive. "The low-profile, snag-free design makes it the optimal USB flash drive choice for laptop users who want the ability to transfer, store and share their favorite files on impulse," said Mark Rogers, Verbatim Product Manager, Flash Memory. "It's meant to be left in the USB port for always-ready storage, and can be easily removed to share videos, photos, and music whenever the occasion arises!"

Available in 4GB, 8GB and 16GB storage capacities, the Store 'n' Stay USB drive is a must-have accessory for any notebook or netbook user. Designed to be left in the USB port, its low-profile design makes sliding laptops or notebooks out of travel bags, sleeves and cases a cinch. It protrudes a mere 5 mm and can be easily removed for quick, convenient file sharing. Compatible with most Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7 as well as Mac OS 9 or higher systems, the ultra compact Store 'n' Stay USB Drive features a USB 2.0 interface and is backed by Verbatim's Limited Lifetime Warranty.

Patriot Memory, a global pioneer in high-performance memory, NAND flash, storage and enthusiast computer products, today announces the new high-performance Torqx 2 - a new SSD that delivers the perfect balance of price and performance. The Patriot Torqx 2 series enables users to boost performance of existing desktops and notebooks to achieve maximum performance with SATA II 3.0 Gb/s interfaces.

By combining a cutting-edge newSSD controller with high-performance 3x-nm NAND flash memory, the Patriot Torqx 2 SSDs achieve up to read speeds up to 270MB/s for a noticeable performance boost with daily computing tasks. Write speeds up to 230MB/s ensure the Patriot Torqx 2 series can write virtually as fast as it reads for lightning-fast software installations and large-file creation.

Intel Corporation (Nasdaq:INTC) and Micron Technology, Inc. today expanded their NAND Flash memory joint venture operations with the official opening of IM Flash Singapore. The US$3 billion facility is expected to employ about 1,200 and is currently ramping production of the companies' industry-leading 25 nanometer (nm) NAND Flash memory. The companies announced the opening of the state-of-the-art 300 millimeter facility at a ceremony with Singapore government representatives, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

"In just five short years, Intel and Micron have successfully collaborated to become the industry's NAND Flash leader," said Steve Appleton, Micron Chairman and CEO. "The opening of IM Flash Singapore marks another significant milestone in our partnership and complements Micron's Singapore operations that serve as our company's Asian hub."

Toshiba Corporation, reinforcing its leadership in the development and fabrication of cutting-edge, high density NAND flash memories, today announced that it has fabricated NAND flash memories with 19 nm process technology, the finest level yet achieved. This latest technology advance has already been applied to 2-bit-per-cell 64-gigabit (Gb) chips that are the world's smallest and offer the highest density on a single chip (8 gigabytes (GB)). Toshiba will also add 3-bit-per-cell products fabricated with the 19nm process technology to its product line-up.

Samples of 2-bit-per-cell 64-gigabit will be available from the end of this month with mass production scheduled for the third quarter of the year (July to September 2011). Toshiba leads the industry in fabricating high density, small die size NAND flash memory chips. Application of the 19nm generation process technology will further shrink chip size, allowing Toshiba to assemble sixteen 64Gbit NAND flash memory chips in one package and to deliver 128GB devices for application in smartphones and tablet PCs. The 19nm process products are also equipped with Toggle DDR2.0, which enhances data transfer speed.

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, today announced the publication of its next-generation storage system standard, Universal Flash Storage (UFS). UFS is designed to be the most advanced specification for both embedded and removable flash memory-based storage in mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet computers.

The UFS standard represents an evolutionary progression of JEDEC standards in this field, and has been specifically tailored for mobile applications and computing systems requiring high performance and low power consumption. The initial data throughput for UFS will be 300 megabytes per second (MB/s), and the standard also supports command queuing features to raise random read/write speeds. JESD220 Universal Flash Storage may be downloaded free of charge from the JEDEC website here.

SanDisk today announced the world's fastest high-capacity CompactFlash card. The latest milestone in SanDisk's long history of industry-leading products, the SanDisk Extreme Pro CompactFlash card features 128 gigabytes (GB) of storage and up to 100 megabyte per second (MB/sec) write speeds. With its Power Core controller and UDMA-7 interface, the card delivers the performance demanded by high-end DSLR cameras.

SanDisk today announced the world's fastest high-capacity CompactFlash card. The latest milestone in SanDisk's long history of industry-leading products, the SanDisk Extreme Pro CompactFlash card features 128 gigabytes (GB) of storage and up to 100 megabyte per second (MB/sec) write speeds. With its Power Core controller and UDMA-7 interface, the card delivers the performance demanded by high-end DSLR cameras.

Micron Technology, Inc. today introduced a portfolio of high-capacity flash memory products that will lengthen the life of NAND for years to come. By integrating the error management techniques in the same NAND package, the new Micron ClearNAND devices alleviate the challenges traditionally found in NAND process shrinks. Micron's ClearNAND portfolio extends the opportunities for more advanced NAND process generations to be used in enterprise servers, tablet PCs, portable media players, and dozens of other consumer applications.

"The pace of NAND scaling is largely responsible for the incredible growth and success the industry has seen to date, and for helping to create new flash-based storage solutions," said Glen Hawk, vice president of Micron's NAND Solutions Group. "While the advantages in NAND scaling are evident, so are the challenges with the technology becoming increasingly more difficult to manage. Micron's ClearNAND products remove this management burden for our customers and extend the life of this all-important technology."

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced today the industry's first production of a 3-bit-cell (3bit), 64 gigabit (Gb) NAND flash using 20 nanometer (nm)-class process technology. The highly advanced new chip can be used in high-density flash solutions such as USB flash drives (UFDs) and Secure Digital (SD) memory cards.

"Samsung has repeatedly provided the market with leading-edge NAND flash solutions, including the introduction of 30nm-class, 32Gb 3-bit NAND flash last November," said Seijin Kim, vice president, Flash Memory Planning/Enabling, Samsung Electronics. "By now entering into full production of 20nm-class 64Gb 3-bit devices, we expect to accelerate adoption of our high-performance NAND solutions that use Toggle DDR technology, for applications that also require high-density NAND."