Samsung Develops Tiny 32 Gb Flash Chip

Samsung Electronics’ new 40-nanometer 32 Gb NAND Flash chip. The chips are made from the wafer seen in the back.

Samsung Electronics says it has developed the world’s first 40-nanometer 32-Gb Flash memory, which is just about the size of a thumbnail but able to store 1,000 MP3 music files. The president of Samsung Electronics' semiconductor business Hwang Chang-gyu announced the next-generation of memory at a press conference in Seoul on Monday.

Samsung’s development of the 32 Gb flash memory chip proves the theory that memory density doubles every year for the seventh consecutive year after the development of 256 Mb Flash memory chip in 1999. Hwang first introduced the theory, which bears his name, in a keynote speech at the ISSCC in February 2002. One nanometer is one billionth of a meter. The new 40-nanometer 32-Gigabit NAND flash has as many as 32.8 billion transistors on a surface the size of a thumbnail.