It doesn’t really ‘stand’ for anything. It’s a reference to the type of circuitry ‘gate’ technology used in the memory design. There are two types of flash memory circuit technologies, NAND and NOR.

Both are used in a variety of devices, each with certain advantages.

NOR was developed first by Intel. NAND was developed shortly afterwards by Toshiba.

Gates are basic circuits that have at least one (and usually more) input and exactly one output. Input and output values are the logical values true and false. In computer architecture it is common to use 0 for false and 1 for true. Gates have no memory. The value of the output depends only on the current value of the inputs. This fact makes it possible to use a truth table to fully describe the behavior of a gate.

We usually consider three basic kinds of gates, and-gates, or-gates, and not-gates (or inverters).

The nand-gate is an and-gate with an inverter on the output.

The nor-gate is an or-gate with an inverter on the output.

That is it in a nutshell. Hope that answered your question . . .

lardog