Applied Materials has advanced the state of the art in etch technology with the launch of the Applied Centura Avatar dielectric etch system. This breakthrough system is designed to solve one of the most demanding challenges in creating the 3D memory architectures that deliver the high-density, terabit storage capability required for tomorrow's data-intensive mobile devices.

LSI has announced several demonstrations of its SandForce SF-2000 flash storage processors using Toshiba 19nm and Intel 20nm NAND flash memory - the most advanced flash memory technology currently available for SSD applications.

When Apple launched the iPod nano, it attracted plenty of attention. While consumers swooned over its sleek design, analysts were more likely to hail it as a turning point for the storage industry.

The acquisition is one of the most expensive for Apple since it acquired NeXT in 1996 - 15 years ago to the day, in fact-and should cement the company's strategic shift to solid-state flash storage for its products.

Apple is reportedly going to use part of its enormous pile of cash to buy an Israeli fabless semiconductor company that specializes in flash storage solutions.

iFixit's teardown shows an abundance of TI silicon, with flash memory storage and system memory from Samsung and Hynix, respectively.

While Amazon prepares to ship out the Kindle Fire, it has quietly released a significant software update to the Kindle Keyboard, which expands cloud storage support for personal documents.

Texas Memory Systems, best known for its pricey, yet extremely high-performance NAND flash-based storage arrays, has introduced a new system that it said competes with Tier 1 hard drives on a price-per-gigabyte basis.

Toshiba has announced that it will realign its storage products businesses in a unified organization by merging its Semiconductor Company and Storage Products Company in a new in-house company on July 1.

Code-named Lyndonville, the 710 will be available in 100GB, 200GB, and 300GB capacities, and use MLC NAND flash storage. The 720 Series, or Ramsdale, will be the first Intel SSD line to use PCI Express (at least a PCIe x8 slot) as the interface instead of SATA...

Consumer solid-state drives will have a break-out year in 2012 due to falling prices, which will make SSDs a primary storage option for mainstream users, Gartner said.

SanDisk expects tablet sales will increase from 17 million units in 2010 to nearly 205 million units by 2014. The firm also estimates the flash based storage per device (SSD storage) will more than triple during the same period from 31 Gb/unit in 2010 to 96 Gb/unit in 2014.

Apple's next-generation iPad contains chips made by Toshiba, Broadcom and Texas Instruments, according to an initial tear-down report by gadget-repair site iFixit. Toshiba supplied the device's storage chips, iFixit said, while Broadcom made the chips used for wireless Internet access. TI chips were used to control the iPad's touchscreen.

Toshiba announced it has acquired Fujitsu's shareholding in Toshiba Storage Device and turned the JV its wholly-owned subsidiary. Toshiba and Fujitsu merged their HDD businesses in October 2009.

The sale of new tablet PCs and smartphones with solid-state storage technology is compensating for weak demand for memory cards and USB flash drives, and has led to a 17% quarter-to-quarter increase in NAND flash shipments and an average price drop of about 9%.

New suggested pricing for the Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA SSD is now US$199 for an 80GB drive. Users can double the storage capacity with a 160GB X25-M drive for US$415. The company has also added a new 120GB version of the Intel X25-M for US$249.

More reports on the Motorola Stingray tablet, which is scheduled for 1Q11. The Stingray reportedly will be a full 10 inches with Android 3.0 Gingerbread, 16GB of on-board storage, and Tegra 2. It will also be "hardware upgradeable to LTE," initially launching with CDMA alone.

Silicon Valley may be an epicenter of the nascent electric car industry, but don't expect the battery revolution to mimic the computer revolution, one of IBM's top energy storage scientists advises.

Globalfoundries and Freescale Semiconductor have jointly announced plans to bring a new class of thin film storage (TFS) flash memory products to market on 90nm technology.

Altera has announced it is shipping in production the highest density member of its 40nm Stratix IV FPGA family. Featuring 820K logic elements, the device is for a variety of high-end applications including ASIC prototyping and emulation, wireless, wireline, military, computer and storage.

Greenliant, a new company headed by SST's former management, will use the acquired product lines to form the core of its solid-state storage product portfolio for the embedded system, data center, and mobile Internet markets.

We all know that for the absolute best throughput of storage available to us today, it's in solid-state-drives. The problem with SSDs is cost and the limited storage capacity in comparison to the magnetic solutions. But upcoming solutions from Seagate and Toshiba may be able to come up with something in between.

A new research report predicts that the number of solid-state drives (SSD) in enterprise servers and storage systems will explode over the next five years, increasing by a factor of 50.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is poised to secure net profits for the fiscal year ended December 21, 2010, according to company president and CEO Steve Milligan. Brisk demand for PC hard drives and fixed-cost reductions will contribute to its profit outlook.

Micron Technology will bring faster interfaces to its enterprise SSD (solid-state disk) line in June when it begins shipping its P300 drives to makers of storage equipment.

Avnet announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Bell Microproducts, which mainly distributes storage products, in an all cash merger for US$7 per share.

Konica Minolta has decided to enhance its production capacity of glass substrates of hard disk drives (HDDs) by adding production line in response to a rapid growth in demand and the accelerated increase in storage density.

Researchers from Toshiba and the Keio University in Tokyo have jointly created a 1TB SSD prototype the size of a small postage stamp, consisting of 128 NAND flash memory chips and one controller chip.