Earlier in September 2009, the company has introduced new additions to its gaming card line designed to boost the storage capacity of hand-held video game systems.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the US-based company has begun shipping data-storage cards to retailers that contain chips that store 64 giga-bits of data, which has twice the capacity of chips already on the market. The improvement stems from technology dubbed X4 that stores four bits of data in each of the millions of tiny storage elements on a chip, which are known as cells.

Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal, expects X4 to have a bigger impact as SanDisk moves it to more advanced production processes in 2010 and 2011. “They are doing what they need to do and setting themselves up for a cost leadership position down the road,” he said.

Announcing X4 flash memory technology in February 2009, Khandker Quader, senior vice president of memory technology and product development at SanDisk, said: “The development of X4 memory and controller technologies is a major milestone for flash memory storage that will provide significant long term benefits to SanDisk and play a critical role in future NAND flash scaling.”

Mr Quader said: “64Gb X4 is the result of numerous key innovations, and demonstrates SanDisk's leadership in driving multi-bit flash memory with performance and cost suitable for storage-intensive applications such as music, movies, photos, GPS, games and more.”

Though the overall chip market is expected to decline this year, the flash-memory segment should rise nearly 31% to $18.4 billion after a 13% decline in 2008, predicts Jim Handy, an analyst at the market research firm Objective Analysis. SanDisk swung to a $53 million profit in the second quarter after reporting four quarters of losses.

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