Misperceptions Begin To Dog Flash Memory Chips

Flash memory drives have big ambitions. They hope to elbow aside traditional hard disk drives to become standard equipment in tomorrow’s laptop computers – taking charge of a huge market in the process.

Today, price is a hurdle. They cost more while storing less.

But misperceptions and confusion about their performance and energy efficiency are beginning to prove hold ups as well.

“I think the market is ripe for (them),” especially in tiny ultra-mobile PCs and notebooks for computing on the go, said Knut Grimsrud (pictured), an Intel fellow and director of storage architecture. “I think it’s going to go mainstream pretty quickly”.

But growing misperceptions will not help. It seems consumers are starting to ask whether the benefits of flash memory chip drives are real, Grimsrud said Thursday at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara.

EcoRAM: Spansion Moving Away From Commodity Business With Price Lower Than DRAM. Plans Licensing EcoRAM (video)

At the Q&A session yesterday, Spansion CEO Bertrand Cambou (pictured) shed more lights on the company’s bet on EcoRAM that will help the Sunnyvale, CA, based company move away from the commodity business of NOR Flash memory into premium memory for fast Internet search engine servers.

First, thanks to its smaller size, EcoRAM has a fundamental cost advantage over DRAM. A gap that will widen over time.

“If you look at the DRAM industry right now, quite frankly, they are done as price reductions. They are really right now all below their costs… We have a die-size and cost structure that is much lower than DRAM. We think we can enter the market at a parity… As we are going to go to the 45-nm, the 32-nm, the 25-nm which we are currently very hardly pushing here, the difference between us and DRAM on cost is going to be wider, which we are currently considering this to give price concessions to our customers to essentially incentivize them to work with us even more”.

Social Media is Core to Dell’s Marketing Strategy! (video)

Earlier this week, at Dell’s business notebook launch event in San Francisco, I spoke with Andy Lark (pictured) who runs the computer maker’s corporate marketing about its communication strategy.

And not to sound too pessimistic for my colleagues in the “traditional” media but social media and blogging is at the core of Dell’s marketing strategy, with a dedicated “social media” team to engage with blogs, wikis, twitter, customers, forums/IdeaStorm, etc.

“The social media stuff is probably the most important we do today, from a marketing stand point. The other elements of marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. Social media stuff is much more strategic… Use social media to power the fundamental of the business. That’s what we’re focused on”.

Spansion Low-Power EcoRAM: Hard Drive Capacity at DRAM Speed. Not an SSD. Targets Search Engines, Databases… (video)

At the Flash Memory Summit “Green Flash” panel earlier this week, Spansion VP Jan Silverman (pictured) gave a bit more details on his company’s new low-power Flash Memory dubbed EcoRAM, that was announced last month and is expected to ship by year’s end.

But Silverman started his presentation by an unusual disclosure.

“I run this group at Spansion bringing this product [EcoRAM] out. I should tell you, I’m not a Flash person. In fact I never worked for a semiconductor company before earlier this year. I’m a server guy!”. A quality he thinks will help Spansion better understand the needs of server makers like Dell, IBM, HP or Sun.

Sandisk CEO Q&A: Recalls How Intel Missed Opportunity To Dominate Flash Memory Market. Hard Drive Makers Not Have To Worry Yet, Future of Flash is 3D And More (video)

After Eli Harari keynote, the Sandisk CEO went on with a short Q&A session.

On his motivation of creating the first flash memory and thus founding Sandisk over 20 years ago after leaving Intel:

” Solid state disks replacing disk drives is something I talked to Andy Grove and Gordon Moore at Intel in 1981, 27 years ago… We could do that in semiconductors… I’m just very lucky… This was my PhD thesis in radiation effects in space. The physics was the same… It just happened!”.

NAND Flash Celebrates 20th Anniversary. May Have Another 10 Years, Inventor Says! (video)

NAND flash is the hot memory technology “du jour”. Its chips sit at the heart of digital cameras and many iPods.

But in the next decade it will be eclipsed by something new, says Eli Harari, an industry pioneer who invented Flash memory 20 years ago and chief executive of flash memory maker SanDisk.

Technological challenges making NAND chips below the 20-nanometer circuit width that manufacturing plants are expected to employ not that many years from now are the reasons why.

“We’re not done yet,” Harari said Wednesday at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara. “But in the past three years, the cost reductions manufacturers achieved with new production technologies have fallen behind the price reductions Nand chips have seen in the market”.

And in the future, NAND scaling – where new manufacturing techniques lead to performance improvements – will slow down. At the end of the day, every technology comes to an end, Harari said.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

New Markets Could Turn Flash Business From Famine To Feast

The flash memory business remains in a deep downturn. But new markets could turn famine into feast – and upset several large established industries – such as book and movie publishing – in the process.

So says Eli Harari (pictured), chief executive of Silicon Valley flash chip maker SanDisk. Harari, who spoke Wednesday at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, said,

“We’re running as fast as we can and still can’t recover the investments the industry has made in manufacturing plants. An excess of production capacity is creating too much supply. The industry is not in a healthy state,” he told an assembly of industry executives and engineers. “The market is waiting for new applications to catch up.”

Dell Says Flash Adoption Is Rapid. And So Is Competition! (video)

The hype surrounding the use of flash memory in personal computers remains high, but so is market adoption at companies such as Dell.

This according to Paul Prince (pictured), chief technology officer of enterprise computing at computer maker Dell.

Prince, who spoke at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, CA, on Tuesday, said he expects cut-throat competition among manufacturers to continue. Their struggle has led to aggressive price cuts, rapid improvement in memory capacities – and red ink at some producers.

Flash Memory Summit vs MemCon: An Industry Event, Just About Flash

Just a couple weeks after MemCon, it’s time yet for another memory focused event this week i.e. the Flash Memory Summit also happening in Santa Clara. My Colleague Mark Boslet and I will be at the show, so expect more coverage, videos and photos coming up soon.

Upon arriving at the show, I asked Lance Levanthal, the Flash Memory Summit conference chair how he would describe/position both competing memory-focused conferences:

“MemCon is about the memory market in general (DRAM, SRAM…), although it’s focusing more and more on the Flash memory segment like our Summit. The other difference is that MemCon is more about products that presenting companies are selling more than the technologies, the issues, etc. I tend to think that at the Flash Memory Summit we go more in-depth through out tutorials, panles, etc. Finally, the Flash Memory Summit is an industry event and not just Denali‘s [the company organising Memcon] view of the market”.

Entrepreneurs Praise Blogosphere Power To Boost Web Traffic (video)

So how do you boost traffic to your web site when you are a cash-strapped start-up? From the entrepreneurs on the Churchill Club’s start-up panel hosted by venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki (pictured), social media and bloggers are the way to go.