To: Jupiter who wrote (38167 ) 12/10/2007 8:46:42 AM From: Pam Read Replies (1) | Respond to I don't believe mDOC is dead, not in IP sense anyway. In fact, it's alive and well in the form of both OneNand and LBA-NAND. Toshiba might have been the first licensee for mDOC back in 1998. I assume that both Samsung and Toshiba are still paying royalties for mDOC. de facto standard for booting mobile phones. If both Samsung and Toshiba are still paying royalties to m-Systems (and now to Sandisk) for this technology, then it is inevitable that Samsung will renew their agreement with Sandisk come 2008!Based on this assumption, it's not hard to believe that Sandisk had a hand on the cross licensing deal. If so, why did they do it? I think their end goal is to establish a de facto standard for SoC, and the specs will be merged eventually into one. They probably know it's either they do it, or someone else will do it for them in an open system spec. SEOUL and TOKYO, December 3, 2007-- Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Toshiba Corporation today announced that they have licensed to one another the rights to produce, market and sell memory with the specifications and trademarks of Samsung's OneNANDTM and Toshiba' LBA-NANDTM memory chips. The arrangement is expected to result in increased availability of premium-performance OneNAND and LBA-NAND flash devices worldwide. Under terms of the agreement, Samsung will license product specifications of its integrated OneNAND and Flex-OneNAND “fusion” memory chips to Toshiba, while Toshiba will license product specifications of its single-package LBA-NAND and mobileLBA-NAND flash chips to Samsung . Both companies will develop and market products that are compatible with the respective original-source technology. Samsung and Toshiba each plan to release products next year based on the respectively licensed product specifications. de facto standards and are making sure their margins are protected in the long-run. I am not sure ONFI 1.0/2.0 can go anywhere without the blessings of Samsung, Toshiba and Sandisk!But first, here's a quote that made me think that Samsung can not escape the mDOC royalty issue. "...Originally, mDOC was a monolithic device that incorporated a controller, a small bit of SRAM, and NAND cells. To be more agile in the market and also to avoid being controlled by the capacity shortages of any one NAND vendor, the company moved the mDOC architecture to a multichip module, where the controller and SRAM are combined on one SOC, and the NAND—from whichever vendor offers the cheapest price at the highest capacity—resides on a second chip." Afterall, it's patented and trademarked as Monolithic Disk on Chip. Toshiba and Samsung could afford to implement it as SoC for obvious reason.
