South Korea's tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. said Thursday it has started mass producing a 128-gigabyte (GB) memory chip for mid-end smartphones, paving the road to release more high-capacity handsets at reasonable prices.

Samsung said the mobile memory chip is based on the embedded MultiMedia Card (eMMC) 5.0 and 3-bit NAND technology. It also boasts a data transmission speed of 260 megabytes per second.

"While flagship smartphones are already transitioning to 128GB memory storage based on Universal Flash Storage 2.0 or eMMC 5.1 standards, mid-market smartphones will now be able to increase their storage capacity to 128GB as well," Samsung said in its press release.

The production follows another move made by Samsung last month, when the company said it has churned out the 128GB Universal Flash Storage (UFS) that is faster and slimmer, and consumes less power compared with previous flash memory chips.

The high-end version of memory chips announced in February is aimed at top-tier models, such as the latest Galaxy S6, which will hit the market in April, while the latest edition is meant for low-to-mid-end smartphones.

"Samsung has extended its 3-bit NAND business from SSDs for data centers, servers and PCs to the entire mobile memory storage market," Samsung said. "Samsung will continue to broaden its application of 3-bit NAND Flash memory by developing higher-performance and higher-density solutions." (Yonhap)