Samsung is one of the world’s leading memory circuit manufacturers and one of the most prominent in NAND flash manufacturing. It took an early initiative to push the development NAND flash forward and the latest addition is a 16Gbit MLC (Multi-Level Cell) circuit that is made with a new 51nm process. The new process has a 60% higher efficiency than equivalent processes at 60nm, which bodes well before the announcement of the prices. All in all, this will lead cheaper memory cards with up to 16GB storage through only 8 circuits, but it’s not just the space that has been improved but also the performance.
Both read and write speeds have been improved by up to 80% to 30MB/s and 8MB/s respectively. This is almost as good as current SLC (Single-Level Cell) circuits offers. The secret was to expand the amount of data that can be written and read in a single bite from 2KB to 4KB, but offering the same ECC security as before.
