At US$45 a gigabyte, flash is nearly 100 times more expensive than hard-drive storage, which can sell to manufacturers for around 65 cents a gigabyte. Even in the most optimal comparisons for flash, the technology invariably costs more, say analysts. On the other hand, flash has advantages in space and energy consumption.
When and how NAND flash gets incorporated into a product category depends upon a host of factors. In cell phones, the advent of fancy gadgetry is driving adoption. Historically, cell phones only required 64Mb or so of memory, mostly to store basic system instructions. The chip of choice has been NOR flash, a different type that in some ways is more reliable. More than 90 percent of the phones made today store their software code in NOR flash, according to research firm iSuppli.
Adding photo, video and MP3 capabilities, however, has forced phone makers to add NAND to store files. Similarly, smart phones that handle e-mail and Web surfing require far more memory. NAND is more dense than its counterpart: NOR chips for cell phones generally top out at 512Mb. By 2007, Samsung will produce 16Gb NAND chips and 32Gb ones a year later, said Kang. The growth rate for NOR isn't nearly that fast, so the density gap shows signs of widening.
As a result, the use of NAND chips--with some help from additional, inexpensive DRAM memory--is growing in phones. Some manufacturers are even contemplating displacing NOR with NAND for code storage, although that requires rewriting code.
"I don't see many (cell phone makers) sticking with NOR when they go to 512Mb densities. NOR is going to be designed out," said Samsung's Kang. "It is a pain in the neck to switch software so people now use NOR, but let's say you have a gigabit of density. There is no reason to use NOR."
NOR manufacturers hotly dispute this and are working on packaging techniques to eliminate opportunities for NAND to intrude.
In MP3 players and notebooks, meanwhile, performance issues will drive adoption. The motor that spins hard-drive platters is one of the more energy-hungry components in a notebook. A hard drive developed by Samsung and Microsoft in which flash memory caches data for an idle hard drive will arrive in late 2006. The hybrid drive will extend battery life by 36 minutes, according to Samsung. A full NAND notebook would even use less power.
"How would you like 15 hours of battery life on a notebook rather than three or four? What if you didn't have to go through that stupid boot-up sequence?" said Appleton of Micron Technology. "Anytime a solution for storage can be US$50 or US$60 or less, the mechanical guys are out and the solid-state guys are in."
NAND would allow PCs to start up instantly because data wouldn't have to be retrieved from the drive platters. Intel, meanwhile, has developed a technology called Robson that cuts boot-up time by storing the most recently used software and files in flash.
Sam Bhavnani at Current Analysis said most consumers will continue to want big hard drives, but still, he added, "some high-end ultraportables could go that way"--to flash--"in a few years."
Play video
There are currently no comments for this post.