Toshiba Corp. (Toshiba) and Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC)*, its subsidiary in the Americas, today announced the expansion of their line up of NAND-flash-based solid state drives (SSD) with the industry's first 2.5-inch 512-gigabyte (GB)1 SSD and a broad family of fast read/write SSDs based on 43 nanometer (nm) Multi-Level Cell NAND. The new drives provide a high level of performance and endurance for use in notebook computers, gaming and home entertainment systems, and will be showcased at International CES 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada from January 8 – 11, 2009.

In addition to the 2.5-inch, 512GB drive, the 43nm NAND SSD family also includes capacitiesof 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB, offered in 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch drive enclosures or as SSD Flash Modules. Samples of the new drives will be available in the first quarter (January to March) of 2009, with mass production in the second (April to June) quarter.

Toshiba's second-generation SSDs bring increased capacity and performance for notebook computers. They utilize an advanced MLC controller, which is also compatible with further advanced processes, that achieves higher read/write speeds, parallel data transfers and wear leveling to optimize performance, reliability and endurance. The drives enable improved system responsiveness with a maximum sequential read speed of 240MB per second (MBps)2 and maximum sequential write speed of 200MBps enabling an improvement in overall computing experience, and faster boot and application loading times. The drives also offer AES data encryption to prevent unauthorized data access.

"The solid state drive market is evolving rapidly, with higher performance drives to meet market requirements, and differentiated product families targeted for appropriate applications," said Mr. Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Vice President of Toshiba Corporation's Semiconductor Company. "This new 43nm SSD family balances value/performance characteristics for its targeted consumer applications, through use of MLC NAND and an advanced controller architecture."

Toshiba and many market analysts expect SSDs to begin to gain significant traction in the market in 2009, growing to approximately 10% of the notebook market by 2010, and 25% of the notebook market by 2012. Toshiba expects the value/performance of its MLC NAND-based SSD line-up to help speed the acceptance of solid state storage.

Toshiba will continue to promote innovations that widen the horizons of the NAND Flash market and support its continued leadership in that market. The company will spur demand for SSDs in notebook PCs, netbooks, laptops and digital consumer products by enhancing its lineup, offering products with different densities and interfaces in a range of packages, while advancing device performance. For more information on Toshiba SSDs, please visit ssd.toshiba.com.

Micron this week announced it has been working with Sun Microsystems to develop a new single-level cell (SLC) NAND technology the company claims "dramatically extends the lifespan of flash-based storage." Just how dramatic? According to Micron, production devices are capable of one million write cycles, offering the highest available write and erase cycling of any NAND technology currently available.

"Micron is pleased to work with Sun on this landmark achievement, enabling the use of flash in new applications that were previously not possible because of the inherent write/erase cycle limitations of standard SLC and MLC NAND," said Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron’s memory group. "We expect this technology to revolutionize theenterprise storage hierarchy and be adopted by a wide range of transaction-intensive applications, including solid state drives and storage systems, disk caching, as well as networking and industrial applications."

Micron said it is sampling its Enterprise NAND in densities up to 32Gb (that's gigabits, not gigabytes), with volume production on slate for the first quarter of 2009. The company also plans to unveil SLC and multi-level cell (MLC) enterprise versions of its 34nm NAND process early next year.

Toshiba will halt chip production at two plants for nine days due to weak demand, in its first output break in seven years, broadcaster NHK reported on Friday.

According to Toshiba, the company is looking at its operating schedule for the year-end and considering suspending some chip-making lines, adding that this would not be a rare move.

Toshiba on Wednesday said that it would speed up restructuring to cut costs at its loss-making chip operations, faced with faster-than-expected price falls since October and weakeningeconomies around the world.

The NHK report said Toshiba, which competes with Samsung Electronics and Hynix Semiconductor , will halt output at the two plants between December 27 and January 4, the first semiconductor plant shutdown since 2001.

Toshiba made the decision after the global financial crisis and economic downturn dampened demand for gadgets such as digital cameras, Apple's iPod and mobile phones that use Toshiba's flash memory, NHK said.

Toshiba's Yokkaichi memory factory, partly run with production partner SanDisk, has a capacity to make 290,000 300 millimeter-wafers per month.