FLASH market collapses

For now.

Wait a couple of years and see how easy it'll be.

On a sunny day (Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:11:04 -0700) it happened Tim Wescott wrote in :

Yes, that is the eternal cycle, big demand, increase in production, overproduction, we have seen that with normal memory chips too. That is why act now, every day is a new situation in business.

I always wondered... if the cycles are so obvious why don't the chip manufacturers invest at the right time? I would have thought that now would be the time to start building fabs.

As an aside, why is USB flash so much cheaper than (say) CF?

I would like to see some more Flash in microcontrollers. I can buy a 1 GB USB memory stick for less than 10 Euro. This means it should be possible to add 1 MB for less than 1 Cent to a microcontroller? Would be ok, if I can access it with lower clocks than the CPU clock, only.

On a sunny day (Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:30:23 +0100) it happened Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote in :

Greed:-)

Probably volume. While there may not be a thumb drive for every man, woman and child in the US (and probably every other developed country in the world), there's got to be more than one for every 10.

I don't think that CF has such market penetration.

On a sunny day (Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:38:00 +0200) it happened Frank Buss wrote in :

How about SDcards? The interface is simpler, but IIRC you need to be a member of their club, if yopu want to use it commercially, expensive:

;-)

Michael

For external memory this is a good idea. But would be nice to have some more Flash integrated in microcontrollers.

I don't understand why Flash is so expensive in microcontrollers. E.g. a MSP430F1101 with 1k costs $2.48 and a MSP430F1111 with 2k costs $3.04. This is $560 per MB, compared to $0.01 per MB with Flash on USB memory sticks.

AFAIK the best flash processes don't make good dense logic, and the good dense logic processes make crappy flash.

So putting flash in a microprocessor requires a special process, which drives prices up all around.

On a sunny day (Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:30:24 +0200) it happened Frank Buss wrote in :

Good point, never thought about it that way. In a PIC, 8k FLASH is a lot to fill, when writing in asm. I think for C more FLASH is needed. There is also the memory bus width, 14 bits, 16 bits, 32 bits, cheap micro controllers may not be able to address 8GB :-) ?

What I find interesting when we get to >8GB flash is the compare to similar RW media, say Blu-Ray RW?, if the FLASH USB prices drop further, then these will be cheaper then an optical disk. Of course BR-RW optical disks can be produced much cheaper, but with USB FLASH you do not need a 200 Euro burner, and it works everywhere.

I can fit 3 or more hours high quality digital TV directly from sat on an 8GB stick, will rotating media completely disappear perhaps?

And new flash technology will hugely increase density per chip. We're already seeing all-flash (no hard drive) PCs and flash/rotating hybrid drives. The scary thing is write endurance.

John

Bean counters. If you don't need it to meet shipments this month, you don't need it at all.

I guess it's economies of scale. The number of sold flash chips is probably orders of magnitude higher than that of the MSP430F1111. Plus volume per device makes stuff cheaper. Look at rubber for example: A new rubber washer for a faucet recently cost me $0.65. It only weighs a few grams. A new tire for my car cost me around $80 yet the rubber in it weighs thousands of times more.

Ah, but can you play it full speed?

I can't even play (at full speed) the 640x480 clips my camera produces, reading off an IDE-USB card reader!

I suppose Flash has better rewritability than CD-RW though...

Tim

This is way kooooooool

martin

This is really cool:

Very good. Same reason why embedded DRAM isn't that common.

The again, I'd think some kind of stacked die solution should be possible at a cheaper price than separate chips... If you could get volume, that is.