2GB MLC Chips by Samsung

The flash memory market keeps exploding, but remains a higly competitive field for a couple of manufacturers, trying to capture the largest piece of the cake. To do so, they have to cut their margins while maintaining a high level of innovation.
Samsung announced to have started mass production of a 2GB Multi Level Cell (MLC) chips. To reach such capacity, Samsung moved its engraving process from 60 to 51nm, and increased information density by storing 2 bits on the same memory cell, unlike the SLC (1 bit/cell). In addition, Samsung speed up the current slow MLC data transfer to reach 30MB/s in writing and 8MB/s in reading mode (instead of 17 and 4.4 MB/s previously). Samsung pushed MLC quite close to the performance level currently available with SCL 60nm: 33MB/s reading, 13MB/s writing mode.
Last but not least, to use such memory, devices will need to have their firmware updated to support 4 bit error-correcting code (ECC) in 4 KB pages.