Spansion has started sampling the company's first single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory, built using SK Hynix' 4Xnm process technology, and packaged and tested by Spansion itself. The announcement arrives a couple of months after Spansion reached an agreement with Hynix to jointly deliver Spansion's SLC NAND products at the 4Xnm, 3Xnm, and 2Xnm nodes to the embedded market.
The NAND product family complements Spansion's existing NOR solutions, according to Touhid Raza, director of marketing for NAND at Spansion. The new line offers extended support for long-life designs, and high reliability and quality to continue Spansion's commitment bringing the best memory and systems solutions to meet the needs of embedded customers, said Raza.
Embedded applications requiring NAND flash to deliver product longevity and high reliability include auto infotainment, set-top boxes and TVs, and communications equipment.
Spansion SLC NAND will be offered in densities from 1Gb to 8Gb in 3.0V and 1.8V families, which feature 1-bit ECC and extended temperatures (85-degree to minus 40-degree Celsius), and offers 100,000 cycle endurance. Moreover, Spansion is committed to supporting customer products with the same process technology for at least five years.
In the following Q&A, Raza talks about how Spansion differentiates its NAND flash offering from competitors, and Spansion's future product focus.
Q: What makes Spansion unique in the NAND flash space?
A: Spansion is focused on servicing embedded customers by delivering extended temperature, high performance and quality NAND Flash Memory with assurance for supply longevity.
Q: How do you differentiate your NAND products from competitors such as Winbond and Macronix?
A: Spansion's strength is its leadership position and understanding of the embedded flash memory market. In addition to the extended temperature, high performance, high quality and supply longevity assurances, Spansion's NAND flash products are available at capacity points and configurations desired by embedded customers.
Q: What is your current strategy towards the NOR flash business?
A: Our strategy is to continue to be a leading supplier of NOR flash memory to the industry and more specifically to the embedded market, where applications in automotive, consumer, industrial, networking segments continue to rely on high-performance NOR Flash for a variety of applications.
Q: Spansion used to be a NOR flash memory specialist. Can you describe the role of your company for the next three years?
A: We see the role of flash memory increasing with the proliferation of more connected and intelligent devices. In the next three years, Spansion will continue to be a leader in the NOR flash memory solutions market. And at the same time, it will rapidly grow a high performance and reliability NAND flash memory business for the embedded market, as well as develop programmable system solutions that leverage our non-volatile memory technology designed to improve the speed and accuracy of reading data for systems that are memory, processing and MIPS intensive such as in voice recognition.
Q: Can you share your outlook for this NOR market? How about the NAND market segment the company is targeting?
A: We continue to gain market share in NOR, remain the market leader for NOR Flash in embedded, and are excited about the many opportunities for our flash memory products and solutions across many applications, such as in automotive, consumer, industrial and networking. We are giving customers the freedom to choose the right product for the right application from a reliable supplier.
For NAND specifically, we see interest in Spansion's SLC NAND for data storage in automotive, consumer and networking applications. | 