About four years ago we mapped Flash memory prices falls and the rate of the product cycle and concluded that miniature hard drives would be with us until at least 2014. Then along came the iPod soaking up 30% of Flash production during 2005, and multiple chip operations went after the same Nand Flash market, and suddenly prices were falling, as capacities were rising and we are today talking about flash as PC memory instead of disk drives.
Which is why it has come as not too much of a surprise that SanDisk is aiming its Flash Memory Modules for the Ultra Mobile PCs market. UMPCs could almost all use Flash.
Samsung produces the most Flash Memory in the world, but SanDisk probably retails the most memory modules and also supplies the designs for an awful lot of flash controllers, licensed to everyone, but especially its flash manufacturing partner Toshiba.
The new SanDisk line is a solid-state drive called the pSSD (Parallel ATA solid state drive), and is claimed to eliminate the need for a hard disk drive and can store both the operating system and application data for these new devices.
Samsung is already offering flash as a replacement for a hard drive in the PC, but so far only for devices that need to be lighter or have lower power consumption. Other players that are bound to hit this market include the Intel Micron partnership in Flash, as well as China’s Hynix and its partner ST Micro. Intel would almost certainly want to produce enough in-house supply to satisfy its own UMPC designs.
SanDisk reckons it is a pioneer in SSDs for laptop computers, and is making the new modules available in 4, 8 and 16 gigabyte (GB) capacities, with a read speed of 39 MBps (megabytes per second) and a streaming write performance of 17MBps. The storage will supporting both Linux and Microsoft operating systems, and are being shown for the first time week Computex Taipei.
But the Flash revolution is not just about PCs. Nand Flash, which writes in larger blocks, unlike NOR flash which is bit by bit addressable, is finding its way into TV sets, VoD servers, MP3 Players, GPS devices, consumer electronics devices, Cameras, PCs, and handsets which of course all need to store music and video, and in minor volumes of course make up memory sticks. It will also appear in countless lower density devices, like electronic picture frames, car dashboards and home appliances.
The increasing demand on Flash is barely being met, and those companies still able to make Flash in sensible volumes are now engaged in a race, more important than the race to dominate RAM memory.
The capacity requirements will be with us for some time to come through the UMPC, which could use up 100 GB plus configurations within a few years. Of course none of this does anything for manufacturers of 1 inch disk drives, which are now largely looking for markets.