New Flash line uses DRAM production
"Infineon has expanded its memory product portfolio significantly by including flash and can now allocate its memory production capacities flexibly between DRAM and Flash," says Dr Harald Eggers, CEO of Infineon's Memory Products business. "The TwinFlash technology allows us to produce flash chips on the existing equipment used for DRAM manufacturing and consequently to enter a new market with basically no investment in manufacturing equipment."
TwinFlash uses Saifun’s NROM technology that has previously been used as the basis for NOR-Flash and EEPROM devices. The newly developed technology stores two (Twin) locally separated bits in one transistor cell. Compared to competing single-bit-per-cell floating gate technologies with equivalent process structures, TwinFlash can offer 40% smaller die sizes due to its two-bit-per-cell approach and less mask levels resulting in a competitive production cost position.
More than 10,000 wafer starts per month on a 170nm technology are planned by the end of 2004. The next TwinFlash technology node with feature sizes of only 110nm is being developed to further improve the technology’s cost position and to enable larger densities of up to 2Gbit.
The 512Mbit flash chip comes in a TSOP package and is targeted at the removable solid state storage market with products like SD-, MMC-, Compact-Flash-Cards or memory sticks mainly used for digital still cameras and PDAs. NAND flash is also the preferred storage medium for USB flash drives used for data exchange between PCs and notebooks.
Infineon says that it aims to be among the top three players in the NAND market by 2007.
