Those geniuses at Samsung are at it again, and this time they've crammed together so many memory cells so tightly, they've come up with the world's densest flash memory chip. Using a process that packs the cells just 30 nm (30 nanometers, about the length of the smallest virus) away from each of their closest neighbors, now they can pack 64 gigabits of flash memory onto one chip. Layering together 16 of those cells results in a memory card that can hold an incredible 128 GB.

This is a big deal. When more memory can be packed into a smaller space on flash memory cards, the price-per-gig drops. As the capacity of these energy-sipping memory cards increases, they become more practical for use in everyday devices such as laptops, replacing spinning hard drives and promising such features as instant-on, smaller size, less heat and enhanced energy efficiency. We can't wait to see the impact of this technology, expected to hit the market by 2009. — Charlie White

Via Aving and Gizmodo