Seoul - Samsung said it has built an ultra-compact Flash memory chip with a capacity of 4 Gigabit (512 MegaByte) for use in future multimedia mobile phones.

Besides being yet another Flash chip for cellphones with even more capacity, Samsung's new "OneNAND" is noteworthy because of its high storage density. The 90 nm device is about the size of an average finger nail (11 x 13 X 1.4 mm) and can store more than 250 3-megapixel images taken with future camera phones or about 120 music tracks. Samsung also said it was able to cut the Flash chip's power consumption nearly in half by operating it at 1.8 volts, instead of the common 3.3 volts.

As its product name indicates, the device is built as NAND Flash. This Flash type offers high data read and write speeds and therefore is used mainly as mobile data storage, for example in Flash memory cards.

The opposite of NAND is NOR-Flash, which also provides high read speeds, but is slow in writing and deleting data. NOR's use typically is limited mainly to fixed storage, such as devices that carry the operating system of a cellphone. Samsung said its OneNAND device reads data at 108 MegaByte per second and write at 10 MegaByte per second, which is about 10 times faster than typical NOR Flash

Mass production of the memory device is scheduled to launch in July of this year.