Samsung mass producing 128-GB embedded NAND

Dylan McGrath

September 19, 2012

Dylan McGrath

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has commenced volume production of 128-gigabyte (GB) embedded NAND for next-generation smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, the company said Wednesday (Sept. 19).

Samsung (Seoul, South Korea) said it began production of the 128-GB embedded multimedia card (eMMC) Pro Class 1500 NAND in late August, a month after it began delivering eMMC Pro product in 16-, 32- and 64-GB densities.

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According to Kathy Thomas, a NAND flash product marketing manager at Samsung, the Samsung chips are the industry's first 128-GB embedded NAND devices with a random write rate of 1500 IOPS (inputs and outputs per second) that support Jedec's eMMC v4.5 specification, which standardizes advanced features to improve performance, efficiency, security and reliability. Toshiba Corp. has since 2010 offered 128-GB embedded NAND chips that support the previous version of the standard, eMMC v4.4.

Thomas said OEMs are eager to implement higher capacity and higher performance NAND in their smartphones and tablets to boost storage and response time when accessing the Web or otherwise consuming data, particularly for bandwidth-intensive operations like streaming HD video or using social media. "It's becoming apparent how important the flash performance is," Thomas said.

With 128 GB of embedded memory storage, handsets and tablets can store up to 15 full HD, 8 GB-equivalent video files, according to Samsung.

Samsung said its latest eMMC fits into a12x16-mm fine ball grid array (FBGA) package. The company says its eMMC Pro chips read data sequentially at up to 140 megabytes per second and write it at up to 50MB/s, five times faster than Class-10 rated external memory cards. For random reading and writing, it can process up to 3500/1500 IOPS (inputs and outputs per second, respectively), according to the company.

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