Samsung Electronics has developed the world's first memory chip that will eventually replace a computer hard drive.

In a mobile solutions forum in Taiwan Tuesday, the company introduced its 32-gigabite flash solid state disk for notebook computers, and said this year will see the debut of flash memory chips on the world market for laptop PCs.

The new device has half the weight of a hard drive and can read three times and write 1.5 times faster.

This summer, the company will roll out the world's first notebook PCs with built-in solid state disks and seek to raise their market share to 30 percent by 2009.