By Kim Yoo-chul
Staff Reporter

Hynix Semiconductor, the world’s No. 2 memory chipmaker after Samsung Electronics, Tuesday enriched its chip portfolio by incorporating the latest NAND flash chip technology.

Hynix said the company’s ``triple-level-cell’’ technology realizes 30 percent smaller chips than the chips now being used currently in the industry.

Meanwhile, the 32-gigabyte memory allows much higher data storage than the widely-used NAND flash memories of multi-level cells and is expected to cut the cost of production by some 30 percent, according to the company executives.

The product could store up to 8,000 MP3 music files or 20 high-definition feature-length movie files.

``We will churn out the product from October this year and consider equipping the chip into solid-state drives depending on the situations,’’ Hynix spokesperson Lee Si-hyun said.

NAND flash chips are widely used in high-end hand-held portable gadgets such as USB drives, cell phones, car navigations and mobiles.

Bigger chipmakers are busy sharpening their NAND flash-based technologies as the NAND ship is a backbone for the development of SSDs, the next-generation storage device that could eventually replace the traditional hard-disk drives.

yckim@koreatimes.co.kr