NAND Flash vendors searching for new growth opportunities
For the past several years, the NAND Flash industry has been undergoing robust growth, as consumer-based electronic products, namely digital cameras, mobile phones, USB drives and MP3/PMP players experienced surging sales. Digital cameras and mobile phones store their data within NAND Flash chips via an external memory card, while MP3/PMP players and USB drives have the chips embedded directly inside them. To the average PC user, USB drives have emerged as a perfect substitute for floppy disks in backing up data. These four different consumer products already account for roughly 90% of the current NAND Flash consumption. However, excluding mobile phones, steady growth is seen in the other three applications. Many are thus pinning their hopes on the PC sector as the next catalyst behind the NAND Flash industry.
New NAND Flash applications in the PC platform
By rolling out ever faster CPUs, CPU leader Intel has always been at the forefront in shaping the development of the PC market. Unfortunately, constrained by the physical properties of traditional HDDs, and difficulties in adequately expanding the DRAM memory size, the overall PC platform efficiency is unable to keep pace with the increasingly faster CPU speeds. However, the ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost features of Microsoft's latest Vista operating system should help alleviate the problem. The ReadyDrive function makes use of the built-in NAND Flash in delivering more memory cache to the Hybrid Hard Drive in accelerating the PC boot up speed. The ReadyBoost function, on the other hand, mainly utilizes a USB drive in expanding the PC's main memory. Such functions should become more popular, as Intel is scheduled to introduce the Santa Rosa platform in the second quarter of this year, where its Robson technology will include a ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost supportable module.
Although the HHD and Robson module is expected to consume some of the NAND Flash capacity, the chips are mainly used as cache memory, which should not have a strong impact on the NAND Flash market growth. In the initial stages, each HDD will use 128MB-512MB of NAND Flash, while the Robson module will employ roughly less than 4GB. In contrast, the Solid State Drive will carry at least 16GB of Flash. Needless to say, the SSD has strong potential in stimulating additional growth in the NAND Flash market. In the following section, we will take a look at how the SSD market may evolve in the future.
Advantages of the SSD
As mentioned earlier, due to the physical limits of the HDD's mechanical parts, it significantly affects the PC platform's efficiency. A perfect example is the longer PC boot-up time, or when many programs are executed simultaneously. Data accessibility is largely limited by the HDD's spinning splatter speed. Furthermore, as the data inside the HDD is saved in a non-sequential manner (the relevant data is not saved in the same sector), the actuator arm of the HDD must move around different sectors in retrieving the data, which further affects the PC's performance. In contrast, the SSD does not have such problems. Its advantages include faster boot up time, more efficient data searching, lower power consumption and heat dissipation, better shock and temperature durability, a smaller size and more lightweight. The SSD will initially be employed in mobile computing platforms that emphasize on portability, such as sub-notebooks, ultra-mobile PCs and Tablet PCs.
The unit cost will be a deciding factor to the SSD's market success
Despite these advantages, the main hurdle for the SSD in achieving a bigger PC market share is due to its expensive price. From the products already launched, the 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch 32GB SSD is priced between USD350-600, which is much higher than the USD60-100 range of a similar density HDD. Observers believe that in order for the SSD to actually replace the traditional HDD in the NB, it can only happen when the unit cost drops below USD 6/GB. However, this will not occur until 2008 at the earliest, as the average spot price of an NAND Flash 8Gb SLC chip currently stands at USD 9.
NAND Flash makers ready to produce SSD products
Even so, many NAND Flash suppliers have already begun to introduce SSDs with varying densities and transfer interfaces. Samsung was the first to unveil such a product in the 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch size category. Their storage densities range from 4 to 64GB, and use the ATA-5 standard as the transfer interface. SanDisk has also released a 32GB SSD in the two different sizes, employing the ATA-7 and SAtA1.0a transfer interfaces. Intel revealed in a March news release that 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB SSD products using the USB2.0/1.1 standard will be subsequently rolled out for this year. Taiwan's A-Data, Transcend, PQI and RiTEK have also devoted resources to the development of such products. Once the SSD market demand grows more evident, they will be prepared in delivering them to relevant OEM clients.
