Poor old Toshiba, forever trailing behind Samsung in the fast-paced memory chip business. As hard as they try, their rivals keep beating them to market – and in return reaping the glory (and financial returns) of big deals with Apple and other manufacturers to provide NAND storage in their latest-generation DAPs.
It gets cold stuck in someone’s shadow, so you can understand the Japanese giant deciding to step into the sunlight with some bold claims. They’re aiming to mass-produce a 2GB NAND chip just one month after Samsung delivers theirs. Both companies are banking on a vast surge of NAND uptake, as hotly anticipated handsets like Apple’s iPhone hit the shelves and give customers a taste of high-capacity mobile-cellular goodness.
The iPhone will ship in both 4GB and 8GB flavours, taking advantage of breakthrough manufacturing techniques that allow microchips to be made with 50 or 56-nanometre gaps between transistors as opposed to the 60 or 70-nanometres in previous examples to provide high-quantity storage in a compact package. And yet the rising costs of development and manufacturing for chip producers has meant that, in recent times, the only people making money from NAND are Apple. Memory manufacturers are stuck, for now at least, pumping money into further refining the technology, all too aware that a reduction will see a sizeable loss in market share.
