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.

Performance is one area of confusion, he said. All flash memory drives – which store data in a PC even when the power is off – are not created equal. Some slower models might be tainting all flash drives with their less impressive speed, he said.

Power efficiency is another area of confusion. Some people claim flash doesn’t provide significant power savings when used in place of hard drives. But Intel has proved this wrong, extending battery life up to 30 minutes, Grimsrud said.

“There really are power savings to be had,” he said.

Grimsrud said Intel plans to release detailed information and data about its flash products next week at its forum for developers in San Francisco.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

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”.

Second, “technology house” Spansion plans to license EcoRAM through its Saifun subsidiary.

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”.

I also found Lark’s opinion on “traditional” and “new” media quite interesting. Dell’s marketing guru does not believe there’s such thing as traditional media anymore, a notion that was “killed a while ago”.

But there is media that are going out of business pretty soon because they fail to evolve their business model sufficiently and there are media that don’t need to evolve their business model because they are media establishments and have such a status “in the general flow of information” (Wall Steet Journal et al).

“The information that I’m giving you is the asset not the translation of it!”

Lark also is looking to use more crowd-sourcing tools like Facebook apps (Graffiti…) in Dell’s advertising campaigns, cutting in agency fees and such.

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.

Silverman targets the new high-density EcoRAM at web servers running large databases – like the ones used at search engine sites like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo… – that need to respond at user requests at a fraction of a second.

EcoRAM delivers 8 times the capacity at 1/8 th the power consumed by a DIMM and a higher reliability on per gigabyte level allowing hardware makers to build 1U servers with 0.5 terabytes on board. Silverman also notes that unlike standard MLC-type Flash RAM, EcoRAM allows for infinite reads.

Some of Spansion’s slides are available here and the presentation’s video is below.

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!”.

Sandisk CEO to the Hard Disk Drive “guys”: Don’t worry… at least for the next 10 years when3D read/write Flash memory launches

“Flash – at least for the next several years – is incapable of replacing a big part of disk drives. It will complement disk drives and in some markets it will replace disk drives. Because disk drives are so cost effective in… desktop and applications, I think the mobile space is where we’ll make a big play. And eventually the world will be mobile… 10 years from now”.

Sandisk on future investments

“We’re not looking at anything that replace DRAM, SRAM or even NOR Flash. We’re looking at anything that will give you very low cost, very reliable storage that is extendable, scalable… that people could manufacture in high volume. And part of that is a systems solution. System is critical. There’s no way I believe that you can dig out the signal from these memory chip without having a complete solution (air correction, security…)”.

Extreme UV Lithography is going to happen faster than thought. Will help scale to 20-nm, 12-nm chips

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.

Here’s also short video of Eli Harari receiving the cake celebrating Flash memory’s 20th Birthday:

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.”

Harari believes the new applications are on the way. At the top of his list are new uses for flash memory chips in cell phones.

“We think the cell phone will be transformed dramatically in the next few years,” he said.

Many will have GPS location technology and require flash to store maps and receive location-based advertising. So-called smart cell phones will need flash to store video clips and other data-intensive content people will want to carry around.

“Flash also should enable a “digital book revolution” in the next ten years, replacing paper-based publishing with digital publishing”, he said. “This will happen in much the same way digital film undermined the market for traditional film”

Harari simultaneously sees flash memory replacing DVD and Blu-ray technologies in the next five years as consumers become accustom to storing movies and video on handheld devices they keep in their pockets.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

Video excerpts of Harari’s Flash Memory Summit keynote coming soon.

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.

While the competition could mean more tough days ahead for makers, it should continue to broaden the market, Prince said.

“The surprise is the rapid pace these things have happened,” he said, referring to the use of flash in laptops and other “client” products – often at the expense of traditional hard drives.

Both flash memory and hard drives store data inside computers. But while hard drives use thin spinning platters, flash memory is comprised of a semiconductor, making it less fragile.

“What we’ve seen is the reliability and durability aspects (of flash) have resonated,” Prince said. On the other hand, the potential power savings in a laptop is small since only a modest percentage of a machine’s energy goes toward running the hard drive.

He said Moore’s Law suggests flash will continue:

1) Falling in price 30% to 40% a year;

2) Seeing memory densities increase 50% a year; and

3) Achieving power reductions of 30% a year.

Of course this leaves open the possibility some producers will run at a faster pace and spur more competition, he said. But the good side of their ingenuity is it will assure broader use in consumer and enterprise computing, he said.

by Mark Boslet, Editor-at-Large.

Here’s a video excerpt of Paul Prince Flash Memory Summit keynote on SSDs:

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”.

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.

Customers are going to be the least expensive way to tell other people about your service Second Rotation CEO said.

“When we started the business we used paid advertising. And in our company right now, we consider paid advertising kind of a drug. So we definitely migrated away from that addiction and using PR and social networking and blogs to essentially build a viral effect to our service”.

Triggit also works directly with bloggers. Focused blogger can be more powerful than large blogging site like TechCrunch.

“For us is finding very passionate early stage users and having them help iterate [the service] and then when we think we’re ready for a product going to people like bloggers… It’s free PR, free marketing essentially”, said Susan Coelius-Keplinger, Co-founder & COO of Triggit.

Hire a PR person even before salespeople and attend networking events in Silicon Valley, suggests Soonr founder.

“The first thing we spent money on, after we spent money on engineers was a PR person. Somebody that was dedicated to work with the blogosphere. That was even before we have salespeople… In our case the very first deal we got was in India with Tata, one of the largest operator out there, and that was because somebody there read about us on GigaOM. So that’s the power of the blogosphere… Businesses from around the world are sending people here on an on-going basis to see what’s going on. So if participate in those events… chances are you are going to hook up with a global audience”.