One reason will be to get a phone with the new capabilities made possible by 2.5G and 3G, he said. Intel's W18 "is going to enable more of those applications -- photo capture, for example," said Eric Hanson, an Intel marketing manager for flash memory. The chip's higher performance will help avoid bottlenecks; faster memory will be required to support the faster processors that the new phones will inevitably also have, Hanson said. In addition, "not only are the total number of handsets going up, but the (memory) content of each handset is going up dramatically," said Rich Wawryzniak, a research director with Semico Research, a Phoenix-based marketing and engineering research company. Intel holds the top spot in flash memory, with about 27 percent of the market, according to Semico. But Intel won't introduce new flavours of flash memory uncontested. Advanced Micro Devices and other manufacturers are eyeing the potentially hot market as well. AMD, Intel's nearest market-share competitor, is expected to begin moving to 130 nanometres soon. While Intel is looking to stack chips so that a phone maker will be able to triple the amount of memory present in about the same amount of space, other companies are also looking at reducing the space flash takes up. Matrix Semiconductor, for example, has developed "tall" chips that can record data once. By contrast, Flash can be written to many times. But the Matrix chip's taller technology is expected to make for less-expensive memory, which could greatly reduces the cost of storing digital images. Intel will likely respond by going taller as well. The company is working on a variety of new chip packages, including one such package that will include four chips and measure 1-millimeter thick. It will begin shipping the chip in small numbers to its customers later in the year. Intel is also working on packages that will pair memory with different processors, such as its XScale chip. This would allow phone makers to combine several memory chips with a processor in a single package. Meanwhile, the company has already moved two of its three varieties of flash memory to the 130-nanometre process: W18 and "boot block," which is used when phones power on. The third flavour, the less expensive Strata flash, will switch to the 130-nanometre process later this year, the company said. W18 chips will cost about $9 (£6.25) for a 32-megabit model and about $15 for a 64-megabit model. A 128-megabit version is scheduled to for availability later in the year. Intel introduced the W18 on Wednesday at its developers' forum in Japan.
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