To Ship Industry's Highest Density Chip, Fabricated with
Cutting-edge Process Technology Co-developed with SanDisk

TOKYO--Toshiba Corporation, reinforcing its leadership in the development and fabrication of powerful, high density NAND flash memory, today announced the introduction of 16Gb (2 gigabyte) and 8Gb (1 gigabyte) NAND flash memory, fabricated with cutting-edge 56-nanometer process technology co-developed with SanDisk Corporation of Milpitas, California (USA). The 16Gb is the highest density single-chip NAND flash memory yet achieved.

Advancing from limited production of engineering samples at the end of 2006, Toshiba is now increasing shipments of commercial samples of new 8Gb (1 gigabyte) single-chip, multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memories, the current mainstream density, with availability from today. Toshiba intends to start shipping commercial samples of 16Gb (2 gigabyte) NAND flash memories in the late first quarter of this year.

The adoption of MLC technology and improved programming efficiency allows the new chips to offer high density and write performance. Application of 56nm process technology realizes 16Gb, twice the memory density per chip achieved with 8Gb 70nm technology, achieving the largest single-chip density in NAND flash memory. A write performance of 10-megabytes a second, twice that of Toshiba's present MLC products, reflects the efficiency obtained with advanced process technology and doubling page size, the amount of data that can be written at one time, from 2,112 bytes to 4,314 bytes.

By combining advanced process and MLC technologies, and through continued advances in production efficiency, Toshiba intends to enhance cost competitiveness and meet the needs of the NAND flash memory market.