Intel silent on data Flash
By David Manners , Electronics Weekly (UK)
Intel is not giving any date for producing a Flash memory for mass storage applications, despite saying for 10 months that it intends to enter the market.
“We want to be number one in the total Flash market. We need a product to compete with NAND,” says Thomas von Bauer, Intel’s Flash marketing manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Last June, Peter Van Deventer, director of the Flash products group at Intel, told Electronics Weekly (UK): “We are going to compete in data, and there is no reason it can’t be served by NOR. We believe we can increase the NOR write speed by ten times in the next 12 months and by 30 times in the next 12 to 18 months.”
However, asked recently about the introduction date for the mass storage product, von Bauer replied: “Some day.” He would not comment on the reasons for the uncertainty about the launch date, or about the length of time it is taking to implement the mass storage strategy.
Van Deventer says: “We believe we can do some very creative things in NOR so we can compete.”
However, the technical task involved in taking a NOR cell, which is 2.5 times bigger than a NAND cell and some 10 times slower to write to, could be proving a barrier. “NOR with the same write speed and same cost as NAND would address the mass storage market,” says von Bauer.
Bertrand Cambou, president and CEO of Flash rival Spansion, said: “Intel is taking a tough road. It is trying to do spectacular things with MLC [multi-level cell]. I think they are at the end of the road of their current approach, but they keep on downplaying the new ideas.” |
