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 is working with key industry chipset vendors to help ensure a best-in-class user experience for mobile devices based on Microsoft Corp.'s upcoming Windows 8 operating system.

Companies such as Intel Corporation, Qualcomm Incorporated and Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) are using SanDisk iNAND Extreme embedded flash memory with some of their top Windows 8 hardware development platforms. SanDisk is working with these companies to optimize its iNAND Extreme flash memory products with Windows 8-based tablet and mobile designs.

To anyone who's familiar with SSDs, "SandForce" is equally familiar, as it makes the brains of some of the fastest client SSDs in the business. Buyers have also come to know of SandForce-driven SSDs as being characterized by unique capacity amounts caused by allocating a certain amount of the physical NAND flash capacity for some special low-level tasks by the controller, resulting in capacities such as 60 GB, 120 GB, 240 GB, for drives with physical NAND flash capacities of 64, 128, and 256 GB, respectively. This allocation is called "over-provisioning". An impression was built that this ~7% loss in capacity is some sort of a trade-off for higher performance. It appears like that's not quite the case.

Announced last month, the SSD500 solid state drives from Transcend have now started selling in Europe. The SSD500 drives make use of SLC (single-level cell) NAND Flash memory (providing up to 100,000 erase/write cycles), and feature a 2.5-inch form factor, a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, TRIM support, and read/write speeds of up to 260/230 MB/s.

The 16 GB , 32 GB and 64 GB SSD500 models are backed by a three-year warranty and cost 164.01 Euro, 314.07 Euro and 596.89 Euro, respectively.

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).

Japan-based Green House Co. has now introduced a fresh family of flashy storage solutions, the GH-UFI-XSA series industrial-grade flash drives. Backed by a three-year warranty, these new drives measure 47.3 x 17.6 x 8.4 mm, they weight 10 grams, and feature a tough metal body, an USB 2.0 interface, SLC (single-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips, ECC, transfer speeds (read and write) of up to 20 MB/s, and an operating temperature range going from - 40 to + 85 degrees Celsius.

The GH-UFI-XSA flash drives come in 128 MB, 256 MB, 512 MB, 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB and 8 GB capacities.

Macronix International Co., Ltd., a world leading supplier in NOR Flash memory, today formally launches the first generation Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash family, the MX30LF family. An extension of Macronix's existing Serial and Parallel NOR Flash product portfolio, the new MX30LF SLC NAND family will facilitate Macronix serving embedded code and data storage markets as a total Flash memory provider.

As a leader in embedded non-volatile memories, Macronix fulfills the memory requirements of these applications ranging from consumer electronic applications like set-top box (STB), TV, digital cameras, Customer-premises equipment(CPE) and high end networking, through to industrial PC and automotive applications. Macronix has begun sampling SLC NAND products and will start trial production in 2012 Q1.