Samsung will put the first 50nm 16Gb NAND Flash chip into mass production later this quarter, the South Korean giant said today, having just begun sending samples to its customers.

The company said the chips use a "multi-level cell" design, a way of squeezing more memory capacity into a given die size. More importantly, the chip doubles the memory page size to 4KB, allowing more data to be moved around the chip per second. The upshot, Samsung said, was a doubling of the chip's read speed over previous Flash chip generations and a 150 per cent increase in write speed.

Samsung forecast the technology will quickly find a home in devices using Flash storage, including new lines of Flash hard drives and Flash caches for traditional magnetic HDDs, an approach supported by Windows Vista as ReadyBoost. ®

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