Flash prices won't support investments, SanDisk chief says

IDG News Service - If current pricing trends for flash storage continue, consumers will be able to buy a 250GB solid-state disk for $100 by 2013, SanDisk's top executive said Wednesday.

The SSDs would be 10 times faster than any HDD (hard disk drive), SanDisk founder, Chairman and CEO Eli Harari said. "Who wouldn't pay $100 for that kind of a drive? Everybody would want to have it."

There's only one problem, he said: No manufacturer would build them.

"At this kind of pricing, no one will build fabs," Harari said in a keynote address at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. Technology may not advance fast enough to make it feasible, he said.

Flash storage supply and demand are in better balance now than at any other time in the past four years, but the way things are going, that can't last, Harari said. The head of the world's largest dedicated flash memory maker tried to give the industry a reality check at the annual trade show.

The cost of manufacturing a gigabyte of flash storage, used in consumer devices, USB thumb drives, Secure Digital cards and SSDs (solid-state disks), has fallen by about half every year since 2005, Harari said. But the price flash commands has fallen even faster. Flash makers' revenue gains over the next five years wouldn't cover the capital investments they would need to make to keep up with demand that analysts forecast, he said. It's not clear where the capital will come from to build the multibillion-dollar fabrication plants required to make the chips, he said.

"You're going to have to invest $30 billion in order to generate $20 billion of new revenue," Harari said. "If the analysts are right, then the industry is basically irrational and suicidal."

"Things going forward are not going to be the same as things in the past," Harari said.

The industry achieved its current balance by cutting back production due to the global economic downturn that began in late 2007, Harari said. But looking ahead, makers of today's commonly used NAND flash face technical challenges that will slow the pace of increasing density on flash chips while increasing costs, he said. The rapidly declining costs of the past several years will slow down.

For one thing, the latest advance in packing more bits on each cell, which is taking manufacturers from 2-bit technology to 3-bit, doesn't deliver the same impact as the previous move from 1-bit to 2-bit, Harari pointed out. At the same time, more dense chips need more advanced controllers. The emerging x4 technology will only be useful in a few applications, Harari said.