Flash memory market to grow for another 10 years

The storage technology concept used in flash memory is all about locking few electrons beyond a dielectric wall by applying little higher voltage. Though the concept looks simple, achieving high through put, smaller sizes and reliability was a challenging task for flash memory developers. In the past 10 years flash memory has scaled to a clear winner position in non-volatile memory market and is pushing magnetic storage and optical media storage to the sides.

As per Dr. Eli Harari Chairman and CEO of Sandisk, In the next 10 years, the role of flash memory to grow further in replacing optical and magnetic media storage. More than 100 Gigabytes of data on a single chip of flash is going to be the norm. The push is coming from advancements of semiconductor technology in moving to smaller nodes of 32nm and 22nm. 3 dimensional chip assemblies is also an innovative way to exponentially grow the capacities.

The Phase change RAM, Ferro RAM and MRAM may find unique applications but not going to replace the flash memory as main non-volatile memory, says Eli Harari.

He was recently delivering a speech at Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA)'s Thought Leadership Forum held in Bangalore India.

However flash still can't replace SRAM and DRAM. There is full scope and possibility for development of a new non-volatile solid-state memory technology, which can replace all three semiconductor memory chips (SRAM, DRAM and FLASH).

Eli Harari sounded very optimistic on the Indian electronics market, He see a gold mine of opportunities shaping up in India both in IT and Electronics, which is going to explode like a volcano. Sandisk has a development office in Bangalore with 150 staff strength, and is on a high growth curve in terms of increasing staff strength.

He is in full support for semiconductor chip and assembly plants coming up in India. He finds no reason for any failures of such ventures.