The factory will be Toshiba's fifth at its manufacturing base in Yokkaichi in western Japan. It will initially be used to produce conventional NAND flash chips, but Toshiba plans to expand this to new types of 3D memory where chips and components are stacked vertically.

At the Web 2.0 conference, Adobe is cheering for Android with demonstrations on Android devices, free Android phones for its employees and now, a demonstration of Flash running on an Android tablet powered by Nvidia's Tegra 2.

SanDisk swung to net profits of US$235 million for the quarter ended April 4 from losses of US$208 million a year ago. "We delivered SanDisk's first ever billion dollar Q1 in total revenue. This performance was driven by several factors including our OEM business which grew to 63% of product revenues balancing out Q1 retail seasonality..."

IM Flash Technologies has advertised dozens of jobs openings in the island city-state of Singapore for its 300mm fab. IM Flash Singapore is currently looking to fill 61 jobs, including engineering, procurement and recruiting positions which points that they are closer to ramp-up.

Toshiba plans to spend 15 billion yen (US$160 million) in 2010 to build a test production line for advanced flash memory chips, according to the Nikkei business daily. The NAND flash memory vendor has already ordered chip-making equipment from ASML to produce microchips with circuitry widths of less than 25 nanometres.

Elpida Memory has said it bought flash-chip technology assets from Spansion to develop semiconductors for use in mobile phones.

Applied Materials CFO George Davis recently remarked there is reason to think the second half will see orders from Tier 2 DRAM players, and from some additional segments of the market, in particular NAND flash.

That's good news for Samsung, but bad news for its memory rivals that use ASML's tools, such as Elpida, Hynix, IM Flash, Micron, Nanya and others. NAND rival Toshiba is said to use scanners from Nikon.

"I think in the next four years or five years, it's probably going to be the case that NAND will no longer be the storage medium," said a flash memory analyst with Forward Insights. "Everybody's looking at alternatives."

Intel wants to avoid the cyclical, market share game in the NAND flash chip sector against the likes of Samsung, Hynix and Toshiba. But Intel dropped hints it wants to unseat Samsung as the No. 1 player in SSDs.

SanDisk beat analysts' estimates as sales for memory cards for mobile phones, digital cameras, USB flash drives and other electronics climbed 22% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter.

Currently Seagate makes a Pulsar SSD with a 3Gbit/s SATA interface. It fits in a 2.5-inch HDD slot in a disk drive enclosure. A PCIe-connected SSD fits into a server as a plug-in flash card and that's where LSI comes in.

A vice president of Samsung Electronics has committed suicide. He joined Samsung in 1992 and mostly worked at its semiconductor and flash memory division.

Kingston has announced it will replace certain secure USB flash drives with new units designed with an improved security architecture. It was notified in December by a third-party security consulting firm that certain models contained a potential security flaw.

Kingston Technology is recalling certain models of its DataTraveler secure USB flash drives in order to update firmware on the drives after a security company found a flaw that could allow a hacker to gain access to a user's password.

South Korea's antitrust agency on Dec. 30, 2009 said it has found no evidence to back allegations that makers of flash memory chips were engaged in international price fixing, after investigating the issue for nearly three years.

Toshiba may invest 200 billion yen (US$2.2 billion) to expand production of NAND flash memory by about 40% in April 2010, the Nikkan Kogyo newspaper reported without citing anyone.

Hynix Semiconductor plans to invest about 2.3 trillion won (about US$2 billion) in its semiconductor business – 1.5 trillion won in DRAM and 800 billion won in NAND flash memory and logic – in 2010, a 130% jump from one trillion won this year.

Hynix is slated to boost its production capacity of NAND flash memory at its 12-inch, Cheongju fab (M11) to 90,000 wafers per month in 2010 from the current level of 45,000 units, according to industry sources.

Samsung Electronics plans to invest around seven trillion won (US$6.05 billion) in its semiconductor business for 2010 - five trillion won in DRAM and two trillion won in NAND flash memory and system LSI, according to industry sources.

Spansion has announced its MirrorBit flash memory is now available as a verified configuration solution for the new Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA family.

"Apple has asked Korean semiconductor makers to produce a certain amount of chips for its digital products, only to actually purchase a smaller volume eventually. The company doesn't make immediate purchases, but waits until chip prices to fall to the level it internally targets..."

Samsung unveiled a multi-chip memory package that it claims is the thinnest ever, for smartphones, portable media players, laptops and other mobile electronics.

NOR flash supplier Spansion has put its 300mm fab up for sale, according to sources at the ISMI Symposium here.

The major supplier of NAND flash silicon invested "millions" in Fusion-io, said Fusion-io President and CEO David Flynn, though he declined to give a more specific figure. The two will jointly evaluate technology for new applications of solid-state storage.

Kingston Digital, the flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology, has announced it has partnered with Spyrus for hardware-based encryption, authentication, and digital content security products.

"We spend many months developing and then fine-tuning the controller and firmware technology for our SSDs, working very closely with most of the major PC OEMs..."

Samsung and Hynix sources said strong demand for advanced DRAM or DDR3 chips, has resulted in a price upturn for both DRAM and NAND flash memory chips used in high-end handheld gadgets such as smart phones.

The Numonyx eMMC architecture is comprised of an embedded storage solution with multi-media card interface, flash memory device and host controller – all in a small BGA package. With interface speeds of up to 52MB per second, Numonyx eMMC also allows for an interface voltage of either 1.8V or 3.3V.