Waiting For The Successor?

Considering the short-lived nature of most information technologies, Flash counts as an industry veteran at the ripe old age of 16. Flash actually did not make it to the mass market until the mid-nineties, and has only developed into a billion-dollar business since 2000. "As far as the lifecycle of Flash is concerned, we are obviously still on a steeply rising curve", says Dr. Peter Kücher, president and managing director of Infineon Technologies Flash. Infineon believes it will see sharply rising sales volumes for Flash, and is currently expanding its involvement in this market.

Currently, Kücher says, Infineon is making Flash memory with a 170 nanometer feature size, but scalings of the process to as low as 50 nm are already possible in the near future.

Stefan Lai, Vice President of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group, has a similar view. He sees no chance that any other memory technology will be able to take on Flash in the bit density factor alone before 2008. "We have just started the development phase for 45 nanometer Flash, which will likely reach the market in 2008." Before this, the 65 nanometer generation will be available in 2006. And even after 2008 another scaling is possible. "Our view of the future two or three technology generations ahead is always somewhat restricted. But we think that Flash can be scaled down to 32 and 22 nanometers. Beyond that, any further reduction gets very difficult." And this time-frame - between 2008 and 2010 - is precisely when there is an opportunity for new technologies to gain market share, according to Lai.

Despite the discussions currently arising about a successor, Flash is still well-suited to market conditions. Upcoming competitive technologies must not only be non-volatile like Flash, but also beat it in speed and write cycles. They must also be cheaper to produce. "The cell size must be small enough that the memory can be made economically and be as good as possible on the system level," Kücher explains. "Because of their low integration densities, the new technologies are still far from being a threat to Flash. We don't think that we are pushing the scalability envelope yet."