electronic summoning of digits. Meaning
SSDs can do in 200 millionths of a second
what an HDD needs 8 thousandths of a second, and 10 times more power, to do.
This new explosion in solid-state memory represents not only a revolution in the
power and speed of a whole range of consumer electronics but also a huge growth
market in an otherwise grim economy.
That’s true of SSDs, the commercial-grade
version of solid-state memory designed to
store and retrieve massive amounts of
data, as well as removable SD (secure digital) cards and their cousins, onboard fash-memory chips (the solid-state memory
inside iPod Nanos and Shufes). “When
we frst started covering the NAND [semi-conductor-based fash memory] space in
1999,” says Mario Morales, vice president
of semiconductor research at Framingham, Massachusetts–based IDC, “it was a
$200 million market. By 2012, just the
semiconductor part of the market alone
[not including the devices they control]
will be $24 billion.”
4
< 4 >
amazon Kindle
$359
The ultimate wireless fx for
the literate giftee. a built-in
cellular phone transceiver
lets you download up to
200 titles (each takes about
a minute) from a list of
more than 185,000; The
New York Times, The Wall
Street Journal, and your
other subscriptions are
delivered automatically. all
of it is displayed on a
so-called electronic-paper
screen that looks and reads
like the real thing. an sd
slot lets you add your own
content. Ten ounces.
There is a good reason for the sudden,
seismic move to solid state: Breakthroughs
in microprocessor design are coinciding
with a glut in silicon semiconductor production. Flash-memory fabrication plants
built by giants like Samsung and Toshiba,
for example, have all come on line recently.
You can fnd a removable, 1-gigabyte SD
memory card on Amazon.com for $2.49.
Three years ago, it cost about $95.
Memory capacity, meanwhile, is going
in the opposite direction: straight up. San
Jose–based SanDisk, one of the world’s
leading designers of fash-memory cards,
just introduced a removable micro memory card for cell phones that can hold
16,000 jpeg images, or a few hours of DVD-quality video. All this on a chip the size of
a toddler’s thumbnail. This huge rise in
storage capacity and speed frees up the big
electronics manufacturers to produce
thinner, sleeker gear across all categories.
For proof of the oncoming silicon tsunami, go to the videotape. Or not. “Nobody
is buying tape,” says Ben Thomas, a marketing supervisor at Canon U.S.A., one
of the world’s largest manufacturers of
camcorders. “We’re not going to make it
anymore. The format is going away completely.” Indeed, in the last two years,
Canon’s tape-based MiniDV video camera, once its No. 1 format, has fallen from
64% of sales to 14%, while solid-state or
fash-memory camcorders have shot from
December 2008 / January 2009 Fast company 129
