DRAMeXchange Compuforum ' 09: Decipher memory and storage industry

TAIPEI, TAIWAN: Deemed as one of the most successful international events at this year's Taipei Computex show, DRAMeXchange held its annual conference at the Taipei international convention center. Conference participants, ranging from leading memory storage to professionals to numerous related industry experts, came from more than 20 countries.

Two key analysts from the Industry Research Division of DRAMeXchange discussed the opportunities and challenges facing the DRAM and NAND Flash sectors:

Joyce Yang, Vice President of Industry Research Division, estimated that the DRAM supply bit growth in 2009 to be under 10 percent, and the demand bit growth to be lower than 20 percent.

Looking at the capex and fund raising of DRAM makers in 2010, Yang estimated the global DRAM capacity to remain stable year on year, and the 50nm migration progress will be a key factor to more supply growth. She further noted the supply bit growth will likely reach 20 percent ~ 30 percent in 2010, while demand bit growth may be under 20 percent, due to low content growth of Microsoft's new Windows7 operating system as well as the rising popularity of netbooks.

Yang pointed out that if demand shifts to DDR3 faster than the supply shift to DDR3, it could cause a DDR3 shortage, which could stimulate ASP growth in 2010.

Meanwhile, Wayne Chen, Director of Industry Research Division, pointed out due to the suppliers' output reduction and timely drive of demand from the Chinese market, the NAND Flash price has bottomed out of the steep drop in 2008 and rallied back to near the cost. He also added that the demand for NAND Flash will continue to recover in 2009.

The capacity and new technologies of manufacturers will see adjustments, balancing the demand and supply in the market, while the applications of Flash will expand to new fields like SSDs. He also predicted that from 2009 to 2012, the annual output value of global NAND Flash industry will continue to grow, with the yearly growth rate to reach near 30 percent by 2012.

Separately, three guest speakers also shared their valuable industry experience and professional viewpoint at the event:

SanDisk: Operator netbooks to take off in 2010
Doreet Oren, Director Product Marketing of SanDisk, US , shared the viewpoints and suggestions based on the company's long-time cultivation in the SSD field, which will mainly concern the market tendency of Netbooks. SanDisk believes that operator Netbooks to take off in 2010.

Sandisk introduced its nCache, the SSD efficiency improving technology, which has some advantages over the traditional DRAM cache. In addition the vRPM, a new guideline for measuring SSDs which regards higher IOPS to provide better user experiences.

JMicron: SSD transforming interface will continue to advance forward
The world's leading NAND flash controller provider, JMicron Technology's CEO, Tim Liu, addressed the elementary keys and possible problems on the efficiency of SSDs.

The company estimates that the SSD transforming interface will continue to advance forward, while the process technology of NAND Flash will evolve to 2X NM amid the development of the mainstream 3X nm. Compatibility of the controller IC with the Flash chip is important;the fault-tolerance of ECC should be improved to 15bit or 24bit.

Hitachi GST: By 2010, server field will account for 70 percent of global enterprise-level SSD market
Steven Liu, General Manager of Taiwan & Shanghai Region of Hitachi Global Storage Technology, pointed out that in the enterprise-level storage system pyramid, the top portion will be occupied by SSDs, the middle will be the 2.5 inch, 15,000 round SAS system for significant applications as well as 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch 7,200 round SATA/SAS for regular applications, and the base will be the magnetic tapes and optical hard disk storage devices for storing copies.

Hitachi estimated that by 2010, the server field will account for 70 percent of the global enterprise-level SSD market, and the storage array field will take up 30 percent. The company also forecasts the price of each GB in the SSD to fall to USD 3 in 2012 from the current USD20.

SanDisk release
The challenge to deliver low cost computing devices with a user experience that meets the intended usage scenario continues to segment the netbook market and introduce innovative solutions. The netbook market is expanding from the traditional retail channel to sales via the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).

The storage device, being a significant part of the BOM, takes a front seat in this discussion. The known SSD value proposition of reliability, performance, form factor and power consumption is now complemented by lower cost than HDDs at the required lower capacities

At the CompuForum 2009, a global seminar to be hosted by DRAMeXchange, SanDisk, the inventor and world's largest supplier of flash storage cards will introduce a revolutionary method specifically geared to enhance performance when faced with an actual typical Netbook usage scenario.

SanDisk's second generation pSSD being introduced at Computex employs a new technology called nCache to improve user responsiveness and address incidence of "stalling" or "shuddering" seen in first generation Netbook SSDs. This non-volatile write cache feature is capable of supporting burst performance up to 5 times the steady state performance, to further enhance the user experience. In addition because nCache is non-volatile the user's data is always protected.