Intel Corp., the world’s largest supplier of x86 microprocessors, announced Thursday its new NOR flash memory products that are designed for emerging low-cost cell phone segment. The company believes that low-cost mobile phones will catalyze huge demand for its NOR flash memory.

“We’re expanding Intel’s proven leadership in NOR flash memory for handsets to the emerging low-cost handset market segment,” said Darin Billerbeck, vice president and general manager of Intel’s flash products group.

The new products have a new pin sharing package to minimize pin count and are configured to work with low-cost, single-chip baseband and RF solutions from leading chipset suppliers. Major handset vendors are expected to start introducing low-cost cell phones based on Intel flash products this quarter.

“Our handset customers can choose from a comprehensive menu of NOR flash memory products from 32Mb density at the low end to 1Gb density for multi-media cell phones,” added Mr. Billerbeck

Intel’s products for the low-cost handset market segment feature cost-efficient, lower density NOR flash memory products from 32Mb to 256Mb with optional RAM in a multi-chip package. These products include a common 88-ball QUAD+ package with an address-data multiplexed (A/D Mux) configuration that simplifies the design-in process, enabling faster time-to-market and lower design costs. These memory solutions are expected to evolve to also support the common 107-ball x 16C package with an A/D Mux configuration.

To enable accelerated design cycles, Intel offers a portable low-cost handset design kit, which includes a design guide, product datasheets and migration guides. Available in both single-chip and multi-cell packages, the products are sampling to customers now and will be in volume production in the third quarter this year. 

“We view the low-cost handset market segment as an ongoing growth opportunity and we have a migration path in place to transition our products from 130nm and 90nm process technology to 65nm process technology in 2007,” Billerbeck added.