Two of the world's largest manufacturers of NAND flash memory - Samsung Electronics and Toshiba Corp. - on Thursday agreed to jointly promote the 400Mb/s DDR 2.0 NAND interface. Both companies said they will support a standard industry specification to enable broad-scale acceptance of this new high-speed technology.

"Toggle DDR provides a faster interface than conventional NAND using an asynchronous design, delivering the benefits of high-speed data transfer to a wider market, such as for solid state drive (SSD) applications including enterprise storage, mobile phones, multimedia terminals and consumer products," said Masaki Momodomi, technical executive at memory product division at Toshiba.

The current toggle DDR 1.0 specification applies a DDR interface to conventional single data rate (SDR) NAND architecture. The resulting NAND chip has a 133Mb/s interface. Samsung and Toshiba will focus on assuring a 400Mbps interface for the toggle DDR 2.0 specification, which provides a three-fold increase over toggle DDR 1.0, and a ten-fold increase over 40Mb/s SDR NAND in widespread use today.

Both companies support industry-wide adoption of the high-speed  specification, which would facilitate faster acceptance of toggle DDR memory with hardware engineers and application designers.  Last month, each company started participating in standardization efforts for the new technology through the JEDEC solid-state technology association.

"Our introduction of high-speed 30nm-class NAND late last year served as an initial pathway for stimulating acceptance of the new high-performance toggle DDR technology. Now, continual upgrades in high-speed performance will create new applications and broader market opportunities for NAND flash memory. The rapid adoption of fourth generation (4G) smartphones, tablet PCs and solid state drives is expected to drive demand for a broader range of high-performance NAND solutions," said Dong-Soo Jun, executive vice president of memory marketing at Samsung Electronics.

Tags: Toshiba, Samsung, DDR, NAND, 30nm, Flash