Spansion Plans for Higher Performance and Smaller NAND

Spansion Inc. unveiled plans for its upcoming MirrorBit ORNAND2 product family, designed to support 25 percent faster write performance and up to twice the read performance at a significantly smaller die size than today’s floating-gate NAND. With the MirrorBit ORNAND2 family, Spansion plans to further diversify its product portfolio to address a broader portion of the high-value wireless and embedded markets, with initial single chip densities ranging from 1 Gigabit (Gb) to 4 Gigabits (Gb) at both 1.8 and 3.0 volts using a Single Level Cell (SLC) architecture.

The MirrorBit ORNAND2 product family leverages the company’s proprietary MirrorBit charge-trapping technology and features a SONOS-like cell connected in a true NAND array. The technology features 25 percent fewer process steps than the first generation MirrorBit ORNAND and MirrorBit NOR solutions, enabling significantly lower cost.

"The growth of multimedia content on consumer devices is driving rapidly increasing data storage requirements, with very high performance at a low cost," said Carla Golla, executive vice president, Security and Advanced Technology Division. "Spansion is in a unique position to leverage its MirrorBit technology to create differentiated solutions that bring significant value to its wireless and embedded customers."

Spansion’s MirrorBit ORNAND2 products based on an SLC architecture, 3.0V operating voltage, and an industrial temperature range, are ideally suited for embedded applications such as plug-in the wall, car multimedia, networking infrastructure, and industrial control systems. Spansion expects to integrate ‘managed NAND’ controller and interface functionalities with MirrorBit ORNAND2 memory on a single chip, for the creation of a full product family of differentiated solutions. The integration of a ‘managed NAND’ interface will help simplify system level design to complement industry-standard chipsets and microcontrollers.

In the handset segment, Spansion plans to expand its product portfolio with the addition of MirrorBit ORNAND2 solutions. Customers will be able to utilize the high read performance of Spansion MirrorBit NOR and MirrorBit Eclipse products for fast code execution, and add the fast write performance and high capacity of MirrorBit ORNAND2 products for data storage. Due to its superior read performance, MirrorBit ORNAND2 offers handset platforms designed using a ‘Store and Download’ (SND) architecture low-latency demand paging for faster application loading.

About MirrorBit Technology
Spansion’s proprietary MirrorBit technology serves as the basis for all of the company’s leading-edge offerings including MirrorBit ORNAND2, MirrorBit NOR, MirrorBit Eclipse and Spansion EcoRAM product families. Floating gate NAND Flash memory vendors have recognized the increasing scaling challenges of floating-gate technology. As companies look to charge-trapping technologies to continue scaling their product roadmaps, Spansion has a significant lead, with almost a decade of experience, in research, development and commercial success with charge trapping technology at leading-edge nodes. With solutions all based on a single efficient technology, Spansion is in a unique position to leverage its internal and external manufacturing facilities to flexibly produce products based on customer demand.

Spansion plans to have 43nm MirrorBit ORNAND2 solutions ready for production in 2009.