Samsung Electronics announced it has developed a faster and higher capacity version of the world’s fastest memory chip – OneNAND – while applying 60nm technology to the chip’s production process for greater manufacturing efficiency.

The new 2Gb OneNAND chip doubles the capacity of a OneNAND memory device (from 1Gb) and increases the chip’s ‘write’ speed from 9.3MB to 17MB per second.

Featuring NOR flash memory’s fast read speed and NAND flash’s high-capacity plus fast write speed, OneNAND holds enormous market potential in a wide range of applications. The chips can be interleaved to attain an even higher capacity, while allowing each chip to independently interact with the system. The more chips that are interconnected the more data that can be processed. For example, the ‘OneNAND chip’s write’ capacity can be increased up to 136MB per second when eight of the 2Gb memory chips are combined.

OneNAND memory can be used as buffer memory not only for ‘writes’ in the system – by using faster-than-NAND ‘write’ speeds, but also as a buffer for high-performing ‘read’ operations.

Because of its exceptionally high performance, OneNAND can serve as a catalyst in the development of new product markets. A much-discussed example of this application-creating role is in how OneNAND memory is now being specified as the buffer memory inside a hybrid hard disk.

“We’re seeing a rapidly widening market for our OneNAND memory because of its outstanding performance and capacity that has become even more noteworthy with the application of 60 nm technology,” said Don Barnetson, Director, Flash Marketing, Samsung Semiconductor.