Toshiba First Announces 19nm Flash Technology

Last week, IMFT, a joint venture between Intel Micron and Intel, just announced that the 20nm flash process has created a new record for flash memory manufacturing technology. This record was immediately broken this week. Toshiba announced today its 19nm NAND flash memory manufacturing technology.

Toshiba said that the technology is currently used in 2bpc (ie MLC) 64Gbit (8GB) NAND flash memory chips, and can be used for solid-state hard drives or smart phones, tablet built-in storage. The future will also be applied to 3bpc products, mainly used for U disk memory cards.

Toshiba said that its 19nm process NAND flash memory products support Toggle DDR2.0 standard, which can increase the transmission speed. At the same time, due to the decrease in chip area caused by the process improvement, they can package 16 pieces of 64Gbit flash memory in the same chip, achieving a single chip capacity of 128GB, and targeting space-limited products such as smart phones and tablet computers.

Toshiba's 19nm process 2bpc (MLC) 64Gbit NAND flash memory will be shipping samples at the end of this month. Mass production will be realized in the third quarter of this year, which is basically synchronized with Intel/Micron's 20nm process.

Update: As Toshiba’s flash technology partner, SanDisk also announced the 19nm flash process in the same period.