Intel and Micron (IMFT) Debut 20nm MLC NAND

Intel and Micron today announced their mass production of a new size of NAND, the worlds first 20 nanometer 128 gigabit MLC device. The new 20nm device can fit an astounding 1Tb of storage into a chip the size of a human fingertip, as evidenced by the picture to your left. This amazing achievement is capable by using only 8 die.

This NAND shrink comes from Intel/Microns joint venture IMFT (Intel Micron Flash Technologies) which supplies a vast amount of the worlds NAND, their primary competitor being Samsung.

Samsung is currently working with its own 20nm chips that they rolled out earlier this year. The rollout of 20nm from IMFT is surely only going to intensify the competition between these two primary NAND suppliers.

The IMFT approach to 20nm is utilizing an innovative planar cell structure that overcomes the scaling limitations of standard floating gate NAND. The new NAND package is ONFI 3.0 compliant, achieving speeds of 333 megatransfers per second (MT/s).The pace of NAND adoption is exploding exponentially as these devices are included in all of the ever increasing variety of mobile devices. Advances such as these will usher in sleeker, faster handheld devices, provided the other technologies can keep up with NANDs rapid development pace. This trasition alone will almost quadruple IMFTs current production .  The components are slated to begin mass production in the first half of 2012, so expect to see these out in the wild soon!