Samsung has new 32-gigabit NAND flash chips that are the first made with circuit elements 40 nanometers wide. These new, smaller chips can be used to make a 64GB card capable of holding 40 DVD-quality movies or 16,000 typical-size MP3 songs. The chip design described on Monday incorporates a new technology called Charge Trap Flash, or CTF, which will allow future circuit elements to be made even smaller and the manufacturing process to be more efficient, Chang Gyu Hwang, president and CEO of Samsung's semiconductor business, said at a Monday press conference in Seoul, Korea. Samsung said the new structure will enable the process to be eventually refined to 20 nanometers, further increasing the memory size of portable digital gadgets.
This latest development from the market leader in memory chips follows the New Memory Growth Theory that memory density will double every 12 months, which Hwang first presented in 2002.
Flash drives use 5% of the electricity compared to hard drives They weigh only half as much as a hard drive of comparable size but read data three times faster and write data 1.5 times faster.
If they keep doubling then the memory cards go as follows:
2006 64GB card
2007 128 GB card
2008 256 GB card
2009 512 GB card
2010 1 TB card