Irvine, Calif.— Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., (TAEC) and its parent, Toshiba Corp. (Tokyo) say they have brought logical block addressing (LBA) to NAND flash memory. Toshiba is launching LBA-NAND, a new line-up of 2-, 4-, and 8-GByte flash devices integrating the new addressing method.

LBA-NAND is designed for use in mobile consumer products and will support manufacturers in developing products that can take full advantage of advances in NAND Flash memory capacity while minimizing development costs. LBA-NAND supports capacities of over 2 gigabytes (GB), facilitating development of high capacity storage (35hrs of music recording for audio data) for digital audio players and personal media players. Toshiba will start to release samples of the new NAND flash beginning in August 2006.

NAND Flash memory currently uses the physical address access method that defines each physical page of a memory, from the chip to the block, to the page and down to the cell. Product manufacturers have to develop host side and driver specifications that can recognize and accommodate this physical addressing, and must bear the R&D costs for developing new product specifications and drivers to adopt advances in NAND Flash memory capacity.

The logical address access method of LBA assigns each cell a unique address that is not geometry dependent. The first cell is simply 0, and numbering will continue to cover every cell. Memory increases can be accommodated by assigning a new address to each cell. This approach also allows block management, error correction (ECC process) and wear-leveling, all of which are conventionally controlled by the host side, to be handled on the memory side by the LBA-NAND controller. LBA-NAND is also fully compliant with the standard NAND Flash interface. As a result, LBA-NAND supports developers in minimizing development costs and improving time to market for new and upgraded products.

Targeting Digital Consumer

The progress in high resolution, high image and audio quality in digital consumer products has created products and markets that depend on high capacity data storage. In order to meet global market needs, Toshiba will continue to develop innovations such as LBA-NAND that bring the latest technological advances to the NAND flash memory.

"As NAND advances to smaller process geometries, embedded designs will need to address higher levels of ECC, wear-leveling functions, and other NAND management capabilities," said Brian Kumagai, business development manager, NAND Flash, for TAEC. "LBA-NAND is a solution that speeds time to market, simplifies design and eliminates the need for the host to handle NAND management functions. Similar to a hard disk drive, LBA-NAND has built-in error correction and performs automatic bad block management, so all logically addressed blocks look good to the host."

Samples of Toshiba LBA-NAND are scheduled for availability beginning in August 2006. Pricing is $50 for 2GBytes; $100 for 4GB and $200 for 8GB.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (949) 623-3099

www.chips.Toshiba.com.