Toshiba Aims at Beating Samsung's Flash Business

Flash and memory is everywhere you go. Be it mobile phones, tablets, notebooks and even desktops in the form of solid state drives. Sandisk has joined hands with Toshiba to build a NAND fabrication plant. Toshiba hopes that this plant along with any similar plants will make them leaders in the flash manufacturing space. Currently, Samsung is the world’s largest Flash manufacturer. The new plant by Toshiba uses a 24nm fabrication process for their chips. The first batch of wafers will be ready in August. Eventually, the plan is to upgrade to the 19nm fabrication process. Norio Sasaki, President, Toshiba, said that they wanted to beat Samsung’s Flash business in the future. 

An ambitious project

The fabrication plant built isn’t small scale. The plant located in Mie Prefecture, Japan is a 5-storey building spread over an area of 187 thousand square feet. The new Fab 5 is designed to be earthquake resistant and also more energy efficient. Looking at current demands, it makes good sense to have collaborations and investments in the Flash space. The investments are sure to pay off. Whether or not a Flash business the size that Samsung owns can be defeated easily is only to be seen.