| IRVINE, Calif., and TOKYO,
August 2, 2006 —
Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., (TAEC)* and its
parent, Toshiba Corporation, today announced that they have
brought logical block addressing (LBA) to NAND Flash memory.
Toshiba is launching LBA-NAND™, a new line-up of high-capacity
devices integrating the new addressing method. LBA-NAND™ is
designed for use in mobile consumer products, such as digital
audio players and personal media players, and will support
manufacturers in developing products that can take full advantage
of advances in NAND Flash memory capacity while minimizing
development costs. Toshiba will start to release samples of
the new NAND Flash beginning in August 2006.
NAND Flash memory currently uses the physical
address access method that defines each physical page of
a memory, from the chip to the block, to the page and down
to the cell. Product manufacturers have to develop host side
and driver specifications that can recognize and accommodate
this physical addressing, and must bear the R&D costs
for developing new product specifications and drivers to
adopt advances in NAND Flash memory capacity. The logical
address access method of LBA assigns each cell a unique address
that is not geometry dependent.
The first cell is simply 0, and numbering will
continue to cover every cell. Memory increases can be accommodated
by assigning a new address to each cell. This approach also
allows block management, error correction (ECC process) and
wear-leveling, all of which are conventionally controlled
by the host side, to be handled on the memory side by the
LBA-NAND™ controller. LBA-NAND™ is also fully
compliant with the standard NAND Flash interface. As a result,
LBA-NAND™ supports developers in minimizing development
costs and improving time to market for new and upgraded products.
The progress in high resolution, high image
and audio quality in digital consumer products has created
products and markets that depend on high capacity data storage.
In order to meet global market needs, Toshiba will continue
to develop innovations such as LBA-NAND™ that bring
the latest technological advances to the NAND flash memory.
“As NAND advances to smaller process
geometries, embedded designs will need to address higher
levels of ECC, wear-leveling functions, and other NAND management
capabilities,” said Brian Kumagai, business development
manager, NAND Flash, for TAEC. “LBA-NAND™ is
a solution that speeds time to market, simplifies design
and eliminates the need for the host to handle NAND management
functions. Similar to a hard disk drive, LBA-NAND™ has
built-in error correction and performs automatic bad block
management, so all logically addressed blocks look good to
the host.”
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