South Korea electronics giant Samsung Electronics Co. today announced the development of a new mobile memory chip that can store 512-megabit chips, and is thinner and uses lesser power than its predecessor.

The company says the new one-gigabit mobile DRAM is at least 20-per cent thinner than the existing product and uses about 30 per cent less power than the predecessor, Samsung said in a release. Dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips are used in personal computers.

The new product can be used for a wide range of advanced handset applications as well as for digital still cameras, portable media players and portable gaming products, the company said.

Samsung said in a media communiqué that it planned to mass produce the new device in the second quarter of 2007 "at a time when demand for high-density 1-gigabit mobile DRAM is expected to be very high."