As the interest in and the market for flash-based memories grow the amount of technologies have been growing as well. The three most commonly occuring are NAND flash, OneNAND flash and NOR flash. The last has a great reading performance at up to 266MB/s, which you can compare to 27MB/s with NAND flash and 108MB/s with OneNAND flash. NOR flash technology’s achilles heal is its writing performance, generally only 0.5MB/s, anything but fast. NAND flash has a writing performance at about 13MB/s while OneNAND recently managed to climb up to 17MB/s through Samsung’s recently introduced 60nm OneNAND flash 2Gb chip. Now it seems like NOR flash could be on the verge of losing its achilles heal as Genusion has managed to increase the write speed to 12MB/s, up from 0.5MB/s.
This information comes from Nikkei and reveals that Genusion, which lack its own manufacturing plant, is working on a 4MB NOR unit that will be available in products during 2008. NOR flash will probably not be a direct competitor to NAND flash considernig the storage capacity, but its reading performance and now also write speed makes it possible to create a niche for the product.
