Toshiba has announced a breakthrough in memory-chip technology. The company claims that its latest memory-chip architecture will offer higher memory capacity, while allowing more compact mobile phone designs.

The breakthrough came when Toshiba’s engineers managed to house two types of flash memory in a single chip. The first type of flash memory is called single-level cell (SLC), which is best for storing programs and applications. SLC memory enables high speed access to run stored programs and applications.

The second type of flash memory is multi-level cell (MLC), which is used for holding data used by programs and applications. Aside from being generally cheaper, MLC has a higher storage-physical space ratio compared to SLC, making it more ideal for storing video clips, images and music.

Up until now, phone designers have had to factor the cost and the space to have two separate chips of both kinds in their designs, which has led to bigger phones.

With Toshiba’s new mobileLBA-NAND chip, mobile phone designers now have a choice about how much of each kind of memory they need incorporate into their phones.

The company announced that the first generation chip of this kind will have up to 8GB in total capacity and will be available this northern summer.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 12:44 am under Cell phones.

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