Yesterday, Micron and Intel announced their 8 gigabit (Gb) single-level cell (SLC) high speed NAND product. Micron said that manufacturers already test the technology and the mass production could be started as early as this summer.

The new high speed NAND can reach speeds up to 200 megabytes per second (MB/s) for reading data and 100 MB/s for writing data, achieved by leveraging the new ONFI 2.0 specification and a four-plane architecture with higher clock speeds. In comparison, conventional single level cell NAND is limited to 40 MB/s for reading data and less than 20 MB/s for writing data.

"With the new capabilities designed into high speed NAND, the performance benefits will be visible to the consumer, allowing them to experience a faster way of transferring digital content between devices such as computers, digital cameras, MP3 players and cell phones," said Bill Lauer, senior director of marketing for Micron's memory group.

The new discovery could lead to the development of faster SSDs (solid state drives). SSDs feature far greater reliability, faster boot times and faster application start-up times than hard disk drives. SSD can also improve battery life by up to 20 percent in notebooks. Although, with no moving parts, the flash-based SSD starts working almost immediately to achieve far better access speeds than a conventional hard disk drive. For example, in notebook computers, data moves to and from an SSD more than 100 times faster than data moving to and from a hard disk.

As a result, notebooks equipped with a SSD can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in less than a minute. Notebooks based on SSDs are getting more and more attractive for consumers and PC makers.

Micron said it plans to integrate the new high speed NAND in its RealSSD line, unveiled last year in November.

As a part of RealSSDs, Micron offers 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch solid-state drives for notebooks and desktops, with 32Gbytes and 64Gbytes of storage.

Micron said also that with the pending USB 3.0 interface, high speed NAND is expected to effectively deliver on the increased data transfer rates of the new specification, where conventional NAND would act as the bottleneck in system performance. USB 3.0 is aiming for 10 times the bandwidth of current USB 2.0 solutions, or approximately achieving 4.8 gigabits per second.