While the economic crisis pushes NAND memory manufacturers to get reorganized, to merge or be acquired by larger corporates, it also forces leaders on this market to keep innovating and increase their profitability.
Toshiba announced it will start in July production of NAND MLC chips engraved at 32 nm. The first batch will offer 4 GB capacity (3 bits per cell). They will be much smaller than those currently produced with a 43-nm engraving process. So, Toshiba will not only produce more chips per wafer, but also be able to offer smaller chips to further increase capacity of SSDs. So, we should quickly see future SSD models with storage capacity of 512 GB, while the price of SSD with smaller storage space should decrease.
