Already a producer of low-density parallel flash memory products, Winbond aims to build an offering in serial flash memory products, which are lower in cost and popular in low densities for products such as printers, wireless LANs, set-top boxes, DVD drives, DSL and cable modems.

More designers are opting to use serial flash, instead of parallel flash, as the source for boot code, which is then kicked into higher performance parallel RAM.

Betting on the development of a trend, Winbond, which is Taiwan's largest brand name maker of chips, took a controlling stake in NexFlash in 2001, when it bought up 54 percent of the company's stock. It has been making the company's spiFlash products, ranging from 1-Mbit to 32-Mbit devices, in its 0.18-micron manufacturing process technology at an 8-inch fab.

Winbond also noted that the acquisition includes a patent portfolio covering technologies covering high-density data and code flash memory.

By: DocMemory
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