Waiting For The Successor? Continued

Sandisk, the world's largest maker of Flash memory cards, also assumes that Flash will not threatened by competing technologies for the foreseeable future. "There has been talk of such technologies for several years, but as yet nothing has made it to the market," says Wes Brewer, senior director of product management and business development for the retail business unit at Sandisk. Currently, he says, the company is producing four Gigabit memory, and is assuming that it can at least quadruple the current capacity over the next "24 to 36 months".

Wes Brewer, senior director of product management and business development for the Retail Business unit at Sandisk

He also wouldn't accept the premise that Flash was too slow and offered too few write cycles. Thanks to a 32 bit RISC processor that is linked as a subsystem to the memory and integrated into a memory card, today's typical 9 MB/s speed can still be scaled upward, says Brewer. For the future, Sandisk plans to make parallel writing and reading of data possible on several chip levels. To this end, the group uses a "primitive" method of piling several Flash chips one on top of another: "That will allow us to increase the bandwidth", says Brewer. In spite of this, Sandisk will not cling to Flash come hell or high water: "For the next two or three years, I do not see any reason to switch to another technology. But that is not to say that we will not be able to add a new, emerging technology at some time or another," Brewer says.

While even analysts believe that Flash still has some surprises in store for us, talk is gradually turning toward the future. "The threat of a successor exists in at least the near enough future that manufacturers must watch how the market develops in the near future," says Robert Nolan, principal analyst at the Nanomarkets consulting firm. However, he says Flash will probably still be on the market in "some form or another" in ten years, if not in the same high volume as today.