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Samsung announced that it has begun manufacturing 16Gb NAND flash chips based on a 51-nanometer process.

Couple this with their new multilevel cell structure and they can create flash drives with up to 16GB on a single memory card. As these become more readily available, we will likely begin seeing more phones come out with larger storage capacities than before. Take the upcoming iPhone for example; it will be touting 4GB and 8GB hard drives when it makes its debut in June.

The new capacity isn’t the only big news, Samsung is claiming these new chips can achieve read/write speeds that are 80 percent faster than current flash drives. Current flash chips are limited to processing data in 2-KB pages, but Samsung’s new 51-nm chips are able to process data in 4-KB pages. Samsung noted that memory cards are already available with support for 4-KB page processing.

Samsung First to Mass Produce 16Gb NAND Flash Memory [via SlashPhone]