ORNAND chip combines ability to store huge amounts of data, run software quickly Spansion on Wednesday announced it was going after a market coveted by technology giants such as Samsung Electronics: large capacity flash memory used in mobile phones, or NAND flash.The company, formerly known as the flash memory division run by Advanced Micro Devices, launched ORNAND, a memory chip that is billed to combine the ability to store huge amounts of data, like NAND flash, which is used in digital cameras, MP3 players and USB flash memory devices, with the best attributes of NOR, which runs software quickly and is therefore ideal for mobile phones.Spansion began developing ORNAND to tap into user demand for more storage space in mobile phones and other devices. The names NOR and NAND refer to the type of logic gate, a fundamental building block of a digital circuit, used in each storage cell. Loosely, NAND stands for Not AND, while NOR stands for Not OR.On Wednesday, Spansion said its ORNAND chips stand ready to compete against NAND in the mobile phone market. The Sunnyvale, California, company hopes companies will combine its NOR flash memory with ORNAND inside mobile phones. The company’s first ORNAND product has a capacity of 1G-bit, far smaller than the 16Gb NAND already available. But Spansion claims its ORNAND offers high read performance, and a competitive pricing compared to NAND.The company has already sent some ORNAND chips to customers to test inside their devices, but Spansion doesn’t expect to have the product in mass production until mid-year, it said. Spansion also announced a higher capacity 512Mb NOR flash memory chip, aimed at mobile phones with more multimedia functions, the company said in a statement. The chips are designed for mobile phones operating at up to 133MHz when operating in 1.8-volt systems. Technology Industry