I suspect the answer to this one is 'stop asking stupid questions', but here goes anyway...
When a top-of-the-line flash chip comes out, does anyone happen to know what the economics dictate the common package format is? A lot of them come in TSSOP, BGA and possibly bare dice/chip-scale packaging of some kind.
What I'm trying to do is get hold of a few-off of fast, high density NAND flash chips in TSSOP48. The distributor is going to laugh, or ask for a million dollars. But if I go to the corner shop I can buy USB sticks for the commodity prices of the flash. I'm quite prepared to saw off the end and unsolder the chip, but I'd like to make an informed guess at what's going to be inside before I start buying every model under the sun.
So, for example, bare dice could come out first and be the first to be integrated into products (micro SD can be nothing but bare dice, for example). Or, on the basis that large capacity USB sticks tend to start large and shrink over time, they could come out in TSSOP (bigger die sizes) and then move to BGA after process shrink. Or they could be BGA all the time but need multiple chips initially which makes the enclosure bigger. Since it's NAND, the pinout doesn't change with capacity (unlike NOR, SRAM, DRAM, etc).
Anyone have any feelings? My guess would be the wind's blowing strongly in favour of BGA but it puzzles me because I still see a lot of TSSOP48 around (in routers, dev boards, etc). Or is TSSOP48 the province of small and old chips?
Thanks Theo