Just a few months back, SanDisk was blowing its own horn for moving towards 43-nanometer NAND production. Not to be outdone by competition, however, the Intel/Micron NAND flash joint venture is now going a bit further by moving from a 50nm process to a mighty small 34nm process technology – enabling the smallest 32 gigabit multi-level cell chip ever.

The 34nm 32 gigabit chips will be manufactured on 300 millimeter wafers, each producing approximately 1.6 terabytes of NAND, which will hopefully translate to denser yet more cost-effective solid-state drives. Sample shipments are expected to begin in June, while mass production should get going sometime in the second half of this year.