What's New! News New Devices Events			View Cart ()   Checkout   MySI Account   Press Release View Our Hot Parts View Our Latest Reports Semiconductor Insights awards Samsung the 2004 INSIGHT Award for Most Innovative Non-Volatile Memory Electronic Times (Korea) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: More Information Jill Perry Semiconductor Insights (613) 599-5145 ext. 4444 jillp@semiconductor.com Stay Informed: Subscribe to our mailing list OTTAWA, May 5, 2004 — Semiconductor Insights (SI), the leader in technical and patent analyses of integrated circuits and structures, today announced that it has awarded Samsung with the 2004 INSIGHT Award for Most Innovative Non-Volatile Memory for its 90nm 8Gb NAND Flash. "Samsung recognized several years ago that PC memory growth rates were on the decline and that the high growth prospects for memory lay in mobile and consumer applications", said Lluis Paris, Director of TECHinsights for Semiconductor Insights. "Being a high density, low cost per bit game, Samsung has aggressively pushed the process envelope with its NAND flash, and is now the first vendor to realize production flash at the 90nm node. This delivers Samsung a tremendous cost advantage over competing vendors." Flash enables multimedia features like imaging, video, and digital music in today’s converged mobile devices. Faced with near insatiable consumer demand, flash vendors are continually striving to increase density and drive down cost per bit. Meanwhile, flash is starting to capture the attention of traditional DRAM vendors seeking new growth prospects. There are two competing flash architectures — NOR and NAND. NOR delivers high speed code execution, while NAND is ideally suited to mobile data storage. NAND appears to be winning the war for flash architectural dominance with Samsung leading the charge. Samsung has long been a proponent of NAND flash and established its leadership position with Single Bit per Cell (SBC) technology. Since Multi Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash is slower than SBC, this technology choice makes Samsung ideally positioned to attack traditional NOR flash markets while most MLC-based competitors are ill-suited to address high speed applications. SI recently analyzed Samsung’s K9W8G08U1M-YCB0 NAND flash, a 4-stacked 2Gb die, and confirmed Samsung is indeed first to 90nm NAND flash production. "Our analysis revealed a die size of 144mm², making Samsung the current density leader in flash and neutralizing its closest NAND competitor from Toshiba - a 130 nm 2Gb MLC flash with a 149mm² die size", said Paris. "By pushing the NAND performance envelope with their 90nm single bit solution, Samsung is not only lowering cost, but also attacking traditional NOR flash markets. This is very similar to what DRAM did to SRAM years ago, where SRAM became relegated to a niche in the very high performance RAM space." For a free Insights report on the Samsung 8G 90nm Flash, please visit www.semiconductor.com. About Semiconductor Insights — A Division of UBM Semiconductor Insights (SI) (www.semiconductor.com) is the leading technical advisor to the world’s microelectronics community. SI supports its clients through the technical investigation of patents, integrated circuits and electronic systems. Its TECHinsights division helps technology companies benchmark competing devices, improve time to market and solve technical problems while its IPinsights division helps technology companies and legal professionals evaluate, develop and monetize their intellectual property. Typical clients are major electronics and semiconductor corporations in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Europe and North America and the law firms that represent them. SI is a division of UBM (www.unitedbusinessmedia.com).