Intel Announces Industry’s First Volume Shipments of 65nm NOR Flash Multi-Level Cell Products
Intel Corporation announced today the industry’s first volume shipments of 65-nanometer (nm) NOR flash Multi-Level Cell (MLC) products, including the industry’s first 65nm 1Gigabit (Gb) monolithic part for cell phones. These new products are based on Intel’s StrataFlash® Cellular Memory (M18) architecture and are drop-in compatible with Intel’s high-volume, 90nm-based flash chips, ensuring an easy migration path for cellular Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs.) Targeted for multimedia phones with mega-pixel cameras, video and high-speed data capabilities, the single chip, 1Gb MLC NOR aligns nicely with next-generation phones coming to market.
“The density of our 1Gb product provides nearly double the storage for multimedia files and enables ever-slimmer form factor phones, both key elements for our customers,” said Darin Billerbeck, vice president and general manager, Intel Flash Products Group. Intel also has a 65nm roadmap to support 512Mb, 256Mb and 128Mb densities of the M18 product family in 2007.
The new 65nm NOR MLC parts from Intel offer fast read speeds of up to 133 MHz, improved write speeds of up to 1.0MB/sec for faster response times and storage capabilities for 4 mega-pixel cameras and MPEG-4 video. The write speed improvement on the 65nm version is twice as fast as Intel’s previous product. Battery life is also extended through low power consumption, 1.8-volt operation and a deep power-down mode.
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Intel's forte: 65nm quite a bit before Spansion.
Intel won't be using that much 65nm capacity for it either because cpu's and chipsets have higher priority. I get the impression that Spansion is switching average density faster since it started switching fab 25 production to 90nm, JV3 partly to 110nm, and sourcing 110nm from TSMC. This trend should continue as JV1/2 are now slowly EOL'ed, as TSMC will produce 90nm at a newer 300mm fab in H2 next year while Fab 25 switches to 65nm (and JV3 will probably switch to 90nm). Possibly including 65nm at SP1 as well.
Spansion has been producing a 1Gb part for a while now but it's 3.0V iirc (cell phone's require 1.8V), while it's highest density cell phone Mirrorbit is 512Mb. Consequently I see some highest end cell phones go with Intel a bit more often than currently.
Lastly Spansion is still ramping 2b/c vs 1b/c while Intel has largely finished that ramp long ago, and will be introducing 4b/c soon. This, plus the portfolio, plus the independent market position, makes for a better roadmap. This again attracts the larger OEMs. So despite Intel's faster switch to 90nm the story is intact.
Regards,
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