Intel, Micron Produce Smallest Flash Chips Yet

"In the continuing race to design the smallest silicon chips, Intel and Micron Technology have struck again. The duo, partners in flash development, were the first to reach 34-nanometer-process designs for NAND flash memory and have now reached the 25-nanometer barrier.

"It's an incredibly small process. If a human hair was a mile wide, the 25nm process technology would equate to 21 inches of that hair's diameter.

"But this tiny design will hold a lot of transistors and hence higher capacity: Intel and Micron will produce chips that can store 8GB in a single NAND device. This translates into doubling the amount of storage capacity in a similar space over previous generations of flash.

""What this will do for our respective end customers is make things possible like new and enhanced consumer devices and compute apps, particularly solid-state drives," said Troy Winslow, director of product marketing in the NAND solutions group at Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) on a conference call discussing the new technology."

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