Summary
Flash memory will hit the end of its life in the next few years.
Samsung and Numonyx are betting that phase-change memory, PRAM or PCM, will fill the void to become flash's successor.
Other companies, Spansion, Macronix, SST, Sharp, and Hynix, have not disclosed their plans, but Intel, Toshiba, and Micron have outlined different plans.
Analysis
Two companies: Samsung and Numonyx, are betting that a phase-change memory (that Samsung calls PRAM and Numonyx PCM) will take over once NOR flash reaches its natural limit. Both NOR and NAND flash are expected to hit a brick wall in the future beyond which they will be unable to scale to smaller processes, but there's no consensus about when that will occur, and the brick wall has moved out more than a decade in the past five years.
Where does that leave the other large high-density NOR maker, Spansion? Although Spansion has not made their long-term plans clear, they have doubtlessly evaluated some alternative memory technology that they are not telling us about. There are many alternatives to phase-change. Spansion has a big menu to choose from.
The smaller NOR companies, like Sharp, SST, and Macronix, are on a slower track to obsolescence since they manufacture their NOR on older processes. They will hit the brick wall several years after the leaders.
But NOR is only one kind of flash. NAND flash, NOR's bigger brother, is also hurtling toward a natural limit and NAND manufacturers have their own plans about what to do when this happens. Intel and Micron are likely to tap into any phase-change advancements made by Numonyx, since Numonyx partly spun out of Intel. Toshiba and SanDisk are pioneering a vertical structure that will drive denser chips without requiring continuous process shrinks -- a significant change from the way the business works today. Of all the NAND makers, Hynix has not disclosed their plans to go past this limit, but the company's partnership with Numonyx is likely to work in favor of Hynix moving to phase-change memory in the future.
A white paper by Objective Analysis, downloadable free from http://www.Objective-Analysis.com, explains why phase-change memory and other technologies must be considered by flash memory chip makers. There's also a lot of technical data that readers of this article may want to skip over, on Pages 4-10, but the first three pages explain in depth why these two companies are putting efforts behind this new technology.
Jim Handy consults with leading institutions through GLG
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
