News

posted on 23 April 2008 11:13

Toshiba expects only one quarter of notebook computers to have built-in flash solid state drives (SSD) by the end of 2011. Even so the notebook flash market will grow 313 percent a year from now to then.

Shozo Saito, president of Toshiba Semiconductor, gave a presentation on the notebook SSD market and his company's intentions at an IDEMA seminar in Japan on April 18th.

He said the global NAND flash market would grow 133 percent annually in the 2006 - 2010 period. Toshiba will aggressively pursue this market and will expand its production capacity at a greater rate than that. It will lower flash SSD manufacturing costs 40-50 percent a year through this and two other initiatives:-

1. The process technology will reduce from today's 43nm volume production to 30nm by the end of 2009.
2. Multi-layering (or multi-valueing) will increase flash cell capacity. Three bit cells are being made now and 4-bit cells are in development.

The 10,000 write cycle limit for MLC flash will be negated, he said, by clever cache use which will reduce write frequency and enable a greater than 5-year working life even in write-intensive environments.

He said Toshiba's current SSD upper capacity limit of 128GB would rise to 256GB and then 512GB but reckoned that hard disk drives would be best for storage needs greater than 512GB.

The flash price premium would continue. Current 1GB of flash costs about 2.9 times the price of a 1.8-inch hard drive. Through its various efforts Toshiba could see this falling to 1.4 times the hard drive cost.

All-in-all he presented a picture of a vibrant flash market but not one that would knock hard drives out of notebook computers completely. However his outlook only went out to 2011. With 10 percent of notebooks having flash in 2010, the 25 percent in 2011 represents an accelerating growth curve.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}