Advanced Micro Devices

Electronic News, Dec 7, 1998 by Peter Brown, Jim DeTar

In a separate memory market development, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will today unveil its NAND flash technology targeted at the mass storage market. AMD claims the NAND technology will allow an added level of reliability for the first time in the storage market. The initial device in the new family, the 64-megabit AM30LV0064, according to AMD is compatible with NAND flash standards, supports read transfer rate of 20-megabytes-per-second, a program transfer rate of 2.5MBps and is able to erase data at 2-milliseconds-per-block.

The chip is based on AMD's UltraNAND technology that combines smaller cell sizes with a simplified manufacturing process to offer high densities at lower cost-per-bit than standard NOR or multi-level Nor flash. AMD claims this technology will allow AMD to break the $1 per-megabyte price barrier for flash memory in the year 2000. The AM30LV0064 is sampling with volume production slated to begin in 1Q99 priced at $18.85 in 10,000-unit quantities.