Readyboost Hybrid Memory for Mobile Phones

It’s a little slow today on the USB front so we’ll take a closer look at a new flash technology from Toshiba. Yesterday Toshiba announced a hybrid flash memory technology which should be a great boost for the mobile phone industry.

Going along the concept of Readyboost, where by you have two memory sources working together to enhance performance, the break through Toshiba made is a hybrid of two current memory technologies, SLC and MLC memory.

So here are the nuts.

Single Level Cell (SLC) memory is best suited for storing information like programs and applications. SLC memory is designed to be a fast performer for such ‘stored’ data.

Multi Level Cell (MLC) memory is best suited for data being used by programs and applications. The MLC memory has a better physical space ratio compared to SLC and is thus better for storing video, images and music.

Up until now, phone designers have had to factor the cost and the space to have two separate chips of both kinds in their designs, which has led to bigger phones.

With Toshiba’s new chip, mobile phone designers now have a choice about how much of each kind of memory they need incorporate into their phones.

Toshiba claims its latest memory-chip architecture will offer higher memory capacity, while allowing more compact mobile phone designs. Great – I don’t know about you but there definitely is a size limitation to how small a phone should be…although on the flip side the mobileLBA-NAND technology will give at least 8GB of storage. Available later this summer to mobile phone manufacturers, which means another six months it’ll hit the streets.