Kingston has announced it's teaming up with Intel -- new to the SSD market itself -- to market flash memory-based drives for laptops and servers. This is a bold move for Kingston, which is usually known to stick to mature markets; clearly, the company sees the technology's potential. The effort "almost flies in the face of the usual Kingston model," said spokesman Dave Leong. "We are large and in charge!" (OK, so we made that last part up.) This is all set to pop off in Q4 2008 -- Samsung, you've been warned.

As we've seen, Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (otherwise known as AIST) is a pretty prolific place and it, along with its cohorts at the University of Tokyo, are now boasting about a breakthrough in NAND flash memory that could result in far longer lifespans. The key to that, it seems, is the use of ferroelectric gate field-effect transistors (or FeFETs, pictured above) as memory cells, which apparently not only "dramatically improves" the performance of NAND flash memory, but allows it to be programmed and erased more than 100 million times. What's more, the FeFET-based memory apparently also requires less power than traditional NAND flash memory, with it able to operate at a programming voltage of less than 6V, as opposed to the 20V of current memory. Of course, there's no indication as to when any of this will find its way into consumer products, with AIST only saying that plans to design and develop the "Fe-NAND" flash memory array circuits and verify their operations in cooperation with the University of Tokyo.

[Via Slashdot]