Trends in memory and storage industry

Trends in memory and storage industry

DRAMeXchange Compuforum 08 looks at opportunities and challenges of DRAM and NAND Flash

Monday, June 09, 2008

Separately, six guest speakers also shared their valuable industry experience and professional viewpoint at the DRAMeXchange Compuforum 08.

Qimonda: Up to 75 percent of power can be saved by “right” memory and system
Peter Schaefer, Vice President for Product Line Server of Qimonda AG, focused on how to achieve power saving and carbon reduction through its Buried wordline process and chip miniaturization. The goal is to lower the power usage and increase performance. Based on the power usage of global PCs, Qimonda's products lowers the voltage from 18v to 1.55 v (a 20 percent reduction in power consumption), and through the AMB’s control, it can be lowered by another 10 percent, thereby reducing the carbon consumption.

SanDisk: SSDs will consume 1/3rd of the NAND Flash output in 2012
Doreet Oren, Director Product Marketing of SanDisk Israel, indicated SSDs will consume 1/3 of the NAND Flash output in 2012, which is far larger than all other application products combined. This trend will also bring in billions of dollars of business opportunities for SSD manufacturers. It is expected that the storage capacity of SSDs can reach 256GB in 2010 and hence emerge as the mainstream data storage device in the near future.

Silicon Motion: SSD won’t become mainstream applications without using MLC NAND
World’s largest NAND flash controller provider, Silicon Motion Technology’s CEO, Wallace Kou, noted that the SLC cost is about 2X that of MLC chips with the same density. SSD won’t become the mainstream application if MLC NAND is not used. Thus, development of SSD's MLC NAND Flash is a key factor for cost reduction.

However, MLC SSD faces major application problems and in order to improve their inherent limitations, it is important to rely on the controller to increase the speed, stability and the number of read/write times. Currently, controller manufacturers use bad block management, error correcting code and wear leveling to enhance the life of MLC chip in SSDs.

ASUSTek: 1bn low-priced PCs with SSD storage in the market, and possibly up to 5bn units in 2011
Samson Hu, General Manager of EPC Business Unit of ASUSTek, indicated that numerous industry professionals feel optimistic about the SSD application in PC after ASUSTek launched its Eee PC during 4Q07, which used 4GB/8GB SSDs. Major PC manufacturers also launched similar products during 2Q08 after the success of ASUSTek's Eee Pc launch. Currently, there are about 1 billion low-priced PCs with SSD storage application in the market, and possibly up to 5 billion units in 2011.

Hitachi GST: As storage capacity will continue to expand, reasonable price advantage will create business opportunities for HDD makers
Robert Chu, Vice President of the Asia-Pacific region of Hitachi Global Storage Technology, pointed out that the current applications of HDD in the IT industry are for enterprises, NB PC and DTPC. For the consumer electronics, there are home/personal data storage, DVR, MP3/PMP, game machines, and automation equipment.

HDD enjoys the advantage of featuring a higher storage capacity, bit cost and performance. As capacity demand of new applications increases, storage capacity will continue to expand. As a result, the bigger storage capacity and reasonable price advantage will create new business opportunities for HDD makers.

Seagate: HDD is seen as the leading device for explosion of storage in the home
According to Seagate’s Executive Director of Korea/Taiwan, Brian Wickman, HDD manufacturers focused on the exploding demand for enterprise HDD market in the past few years. From now on, amid the arrival of the Broadband/Internet era, HDD is seen as the leading device for the storage of the enormous amount of information transferred through the network for the consumer market.

Wickman forecasted that scale of global storage will reach 374 Exabytes in 2012 with an average home storage of 185 Exabytes. Meanwhile, Seagate will introduce its first SSD storage and 2T-byte hard drive next year. The company's first SSD product will be targeted at enterprises that need speedy storage and can afford to pay a premium price.