Ottawa, Ontario - UBM TechInsights has announced Intel Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT) as the winner of the Most Innovative Memory Process award in TechInsights' 9th Annual Insight Awards.

IMFT's 25nm process was found in a 64Gbit MLC NAND Flash analyzed by UBM TechInsights.

The technical and manufacturing prowess of IMFT has been proven once again by the introduction of their latest 25nm 8MByte 2-bit/cell MLC NAND Flash. While most pundits have speculated that NAND has hit the wall, IMFT has continued to be successful with their aggressive path of NAND scaling. UBM TechInsights Senior Technology Analyst, Ramesh Kuchibhatla, explains in his EETimes article the major improvements in process to successfully scale the NAND device down to 25nm and speculates that IMFT may even get one more node of scaling at 18nm.

The IMFT 25nm process is the most advanced, in terms of feature size, that UBM TechInsights has analyzed to date. Andrew Woodward, in his SemiSerious Blog posting, goes into great detail on how & why they have used double patterning to achieve these ultra-small feature sizes. He concludes with a tell-tale sign that 'proves' sidewall double patterned Shallow Trench Isolation (STI) was used in the manufacture of these IMFT devices. The new 25nm IMFT NAND Flash pushes the envelope of optical lithography a little bit further.

Other leading-edge memory processes considered for the 9th Annual Insight Awards include:

• Micron 42nm 2Gb DDR3 SDRAM


• Samsung 48nm 1Gb DDR3


• Hynix 32nm 32Gbit MLC NAND Flash

UBM TechInsights annually recognizes companies for technical achievements in the semiconductor industry and has begun accepting nominations for the 10th Annual Insight Awards. The 10th annual awards will kick-off by recognizing the Most Innovative Mobile Processor late this summer.