Hasta La Gadget!

Let it sink in, 20 nanometers. It wasn’t that long ago when 45-nm manufacturing processes were all the rage. Now we’ve got Samsung following Toshiba with a sub-25nm flash memory announcement all its own. Samsung’s 20-nm class 32Gb (gigabit) MLC NAND is sampling now, however, for use in embedded memory solutions and SD memory cards ranging from 4GB to 64GB. In addition to increasing densities and decreasing manufacturing costs, Samsung’s 20-nm class NAND is claimed to be more reliable and 30 percent faster than the 30-nm MLC chips forming the core of its existing 8GB and higher SD cards. That translates to cheaper class 10 (20MBps read, 10MBps write) SD cards when these ship to consumers later this year — always a good thing.

Update: There’s a chance that Samsung is playing fast and loose with words here. It repeatedly says “20-nm class” without specifying the actual node size. Is it 20nm, 22nm, 27nm? We’re digging for details and will update this post when we have them.

Update 2: Samsung’s response: “Unfortunately, we are not disclosing the actual process node for our memory devices. Thank you in advance for your understanding.” Yeah, we understand: Samsung’s process node is likely larger than the 25nm threshold set by Intel and Micron.

Samsung first with 20-nm NAND Flash: cheaper, faster SD cards on the way (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Apr 2010 03:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Give your car an upgrade: Toshiba just announced a 200GB hard disk drive for the car, the largest automotive-grade drive on the market. Known by the poetic name of MK2060GSC, this 4,200-rpm SATA drive provides vehicle-systems manufacturers with high-capacity storage for telematics, navigation, and entertainment systems.

Toshiba has already shipped 14 million automotive-grade HDDs worldwide, and had 75 percent of the global market in 2009. With more classes of auto offering in-dash infotainment systems, that number should only increase.

With the MK2060GSC, Toshiba is delivering a 78 percent improvement on internal transfer rates, a seek time of 12 milliseconds, and quiet operation. It will be commercially available in the third quarter.

Now here’s a first: the next time you buy an external hard drive, it might come with a library of preloaded movies. Seagate has partnered with Paramount to sell 500GB FreeAgent Go portable hard drives that are pre-loaded with 21 Paramount movies. Buyers will be able to watch the 2009 Star Trek for free. Unlocking the other 20 will cost between $9.99 and $14.99 each.

Once buyers have unlocked a movie, they’ll be able to play it on multiple portable devices as well a desktop computer. If they have the FreeAgent Theater+ HD media player, they’ll be able to watch the movies on their televisions. The movie assortment includes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, G.I. Joe, Beowulf, Nacho Libre, and a mixed assortment of other titles. No word yet on how much of that 500GB drive is taken up by the movie library.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

There are many devices that allow one to remotely access your digital content at home when you’re on the road. These include low-cost remote access appliances like the PogoPlug, midrange NAS storage devices such as Netgear’s Stora, and expensive but powerful solutions that cater to the technically inclined, such as HP’s MediaSmart products powered by Windows Home Server.

Now, however, Dane Elec — best-known for selling USB flash drives and memory cards at retailers such as Target — has jumped into the shared storage space with an offering called MyDitto. The late entrant seeks to overcome some of the setup and access complexities of other products in its class, bringing network storage beyond the early adopters. While MyDitto incorporates a number of good ideas, though, its advantages help only in a limited number of NAS usage scenarios.

Continue reading Switched On: MyDitto NAS has some key issues

Switched On: MyDitto NAS has some key issues originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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SAN JOSE, California — Samsung is one of several manufacturers betting that consumers want their gadgets to look like the models in fashion magazines: Skinny, glossy and colorful.

“Every few years there’s a new buzzword,” says Scott Birnbaum, vice president of Samsung’s LCD business. “First, everything was neat, then everything was cool, now everything is thin.”

Slim profiles are already a big factor in mobile phones, digital cameras and MP3 players, where small size has a definite practical advantage. This year, Samsung, LG, Lenovo and other manufacturers are bringing the trend to larger appliances, like TVs and computers.

Samsung says it is working on reducing the profile of every component it produces–from processors to displays and memory–while upping the ante on performance.

Samsung’s latest TVs are a third of an inch thick. The company is working to shrink them further by building the drivers for the TVs directly into the glass cells rather than putting them on the bezel that surrounds, the display, says Birnbaum.

“We think TVs are going to become a liquid crystal piece of art that hangs on the walls of your house,” he says.

The company showed off some of the technologies behind its new thin products at a press event here on Wednesday.

“Samsung plays in so many different areas of the electronics business from hard drives to flash and memory,” says Rhoda Alexander, an analyst for iSuppli, a market research firm. “So when they try to make everything thin they can layer it all better than anyone else.”

Take Samsung’s latest LED-backlit TVs, which Samsung promises will get up to 40 percent skinnier in the next two years.

“We can do this because we are reducing the number of LED bars that go on the sides of the TV bezel,” says Birnbaum. “Last year we were using six LED bars on four sides; this year its four bars on two sides. In two years, it will be just two bars across two sides.”

Slimming Everything Down

To make gadgets truly thin, every component, from processors to memory to the display, needs to be slim yet powerful.

In processors, chip giant Intel has held the edge, creating faster chips that pack more computing power into a smaller package. By concentrating on low power yet highly efficient chips, Samsung hopes to get an edge on Intel.

“Intel has been doing high-k metal gate 32 nanometer chips for high performance computers,” says Anna Hunter, vice president of foundry services for Samsung. “But we are the first company to offer it in low power systems for consumers.”

High-k metal gate refers to use of an element called hafnium, instead of the traditional silicon dioxide, for the gate layer in a transistor. The technique helps chips stay small while improving performance.

Samsung has also said it is launching a new 2.5-inch hard disk drive Wednesday that can store 640 gigabytes of data. The drives operate at 7,200 rotations per minute.

But that drive doesn’t necessarily put Samsung ahead, says George Walsh, managing director of TechWatch, a newsletter from research firm Jon Peddie Research.

It’s the fastest hard disk drive from Samsung — but rivals have done better, he says. “I have a 10,000 rpm disk drive that I used when I put together my computer nearly a year ago,” says Walsh. “Samsung is also avoiding some of the latest technology trends in storage especially around solid state drives.”

Where Samsung truly has the competitive edge is in displays and TVs, says Riddhi Patel, an analyst for iSuppli.

“No one else has LED-backlit LCD TVs that are as thin as Samsung,” she says.

It’s a big advantage. By 2013, nearly 90 percent of the TVs sold in the U.S., will be LCDs, estimates research firm DisplaySearch.

Photo: Samsung OLED TV (fatcontroller/Flickr)