What's in storage: Bright future for flash memory

After being at the heart of digital storage and mobile devices for nearly two decades, flash memory has the potential to grow even further, SanDisk Corp President and Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Mehrotra has said.

Mehrotra, who co-founded SanDisk along with Eli Harari and Jack Yuan in 1988, mentioned in his speech to industry delegates at the Indian Electronics and Semiconductor Association's (IESA) 'Thought Leadership Forum' in Bangalore on Friday that falling prices and improved capacity of flash memory in the last two decades has made it ubiquitous.

“The first flash card with 20 MB memory capacity cost $1,000 in 1991,” he said. “The latest card we’ve designed is 128 GB, a 30,000-fold growth in terms of capacity, while the cost has gone down 50,000 times. So we clearly see how cost reduction has fuelled flash memory growth,” he said.
By 2016, flash memory will be embedded in nearly four billion devices and is expected to increase by a billion each year on a per-year basis, Sanjay said, adding that flash devices are going to be at the centre of content creation and storage in cloud.

He said he and the other founders of SanDisk had “risked” everything by creating flash-based products, "when there wasn’t an industry based on it”. The company crossed $5 billion in revenues in 2012 to enter the Fortune 500 league.

Despite the incentives for manufacturing in India announced in the Union Budget on Thursday, Mehrotra made it clear that SanDisk is not likely to start a manufacturing unit in India though it would like to grow its R&D centre here.

“The R&D centre in Bangalore with 350 employees, is designing cutting-edge technology. We’d like to focus more on R&D in India,” he said.

“We’re also happy to be the leading brand for storage in India. With usage of mobile phone and tablets growing, we believe we’ll have a greater presence in the market both as an embedded storage and also memory card.”

Meanwhile, IESA said that the finance minister’s mention of electronics and semiconductors and their roles in the Union Budget on Thursday is a sign that the government is taking the sector’s potential into cognizance.

“Zero per cent custom duty for equipment of fabs, 15 per cent allowance for investments over and above depreciation, and the emphasis on skills development – all point to a positive approach towards the industry,” IESA President PVG Menon said.