SanDisk and Qimonda will jointly develop and manufacture multichips (MCPs) for the mobile market utilizing SanDisk’s NAND flash and controllers and Qimonda’s low power mobile DRAM.

The collaboration targets the fast growing need for high capacity, integrated memory solutions of data-intensive mobile applications. This agreement will be executed through a jointly owned company based in Portugal.

The MCPs will be sold by Qimonda and SanDisk through their existing sales channels to mobile handset manufacturers. According to iSuppli, MCPs continue to be the preferred package type for placing embedded memory into mobile handsets. iSuppli projects MCP revenues in the mobile handset market to reach nine billion dollars by 2011 with NAND and mobile DRAM combinations being the vast majority of memory MB shipped in MCPs.

“Gaining access to SanDisk’s leading-edge flash memory and controller technology and low cost fabs broadens our memory product portfolio,” said Kin Wah Loh, CEO at Qimonda. “Qimonda now completes its product offering for handheld consumer devices by offering advanced, high density MCP solutions in addition to a complete portfolio of low power DRAM products. Offering MCPs with advanced mobile DRAM and high capacity NAND Flash will allow Qimonda to optimize the architecture of memory subsystems used in mobile phones to address the growing need of major handset vendors for flexible bandwidth and memory utilization at competitive levels.“

“By collaborating with Qimonda, a DRAM market leader with strong expertise in low power mobile DRAM, SanDisk aims to increase its participation in the fast growing MCP market for multimedia handsets, thereby rounding out our one-stop-shop storage solutions for our handset customers,” said Eli Harari, Chairman and CEO at SanDisk.

Engineering samples are expected to be available for evaluation in the second half of 2007, with mass production planned towards the end of 2007.