Toshiba and SanDisk open third NAND fab plant in Japan

Toshiba and SanDisk have opened their third 300mm wafer NAND fabrication facility in Japan, as the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets continues to fuel demand for flash memory.

The Fab 5 facility opened on Tuesday at Toshiba's Yokkaichi plant in Mie Prefecture, Japan, with equipment in the facility funded by the Flash Forward joint venture between the two firms.

The plant will begin volume production of 24nm process technology this month, and the first wafers are expected to be released in August.

According to the firms, Fab 5 will eventually transition to the recently announced 19nm process technology, claimed to be the world's smallest and most advanced process node.

The 19nm NAND flash will make its way into Apple's forthcoming MacBook Air, transferring data at a speedy 400Mbit/s using a Toggle DDR2.0 interface.

The success of Toshiba's Yokkaichi plant is illustrative of the growing demand for NAND flash from portable computing devices such as mobiles and tablets as well as solid state drives (SSDs).

Research from IHS iSuppli in May predicted that revenue growth in the hard drive market will increase by just four per cent in 2011 to $28.1bn, less than half the increase in 2010 owing to increased competition from flash storage.

"This plant is very strategic to SanDisk's growth," a SanDisk spokesperson told V3.co.uk.

"There are a number of demand drivers such as mobile phones, tablets and SSDs. Mobile phones are by far the largest demand driver, but tablets are growing as well. This is for removable storage cards and embedded storage."

The 187,000m² Fab 5 facility has also been built with safety in mind. Reviving memories of the devastating Sendai earthquake in March 2011, the spokesperson said that the facility had been built with "advanced earthquake-absorbing techniques and protection from unexpected power interruptions".

There were fears after the quake that much of the world's semiconductor production would be seriously affected after several major plants in the country were forced to shut down.