SanDisk in license talks with Toshiba; adds NEC as supplier

Electronic News, July 14, 1997 by Jim DeTar

"That's been the strategy from day one: to basically combine leading-edge flash technology--double-density flash with an integrated intelligent controller. And, too, no matter what you do on the flash side to always maintain a standard interface so the user is spared all the aggravation when we go from 16 megabit, to 32 to 64; when we go from single density to double density--in the future, when we go to more than double density. The user doesn't have to know anything about that. All the user cares about is: Can I pay less for it? Can I get more storage? Do I use less power?

"That's our mission. And we've followed that with zeal and fanaticism, and that's what makes things so much fun. Our biggest challenge is physics, basically. Trying the physics of these devices. And if we can do a good job, we'll have a very, very good market share."

EN: From the mobile market perspective, do you see that continuing to be the way the card will interface with the mobile PC? Will it use an adapter or will you eventually find some kind of a space for a slot for just the Miniature Card itself? Or will you always need to carry the adapter?

Dr. Harari: "For very small cameras, there is no room for the adapter inside, so this is really perhaps an interim step for the next several years for a lot of people to have connectivity. We don't really care how the market wants to evolve. Whatever it is, this is one form factor. There are many kind of form factors that you can plug into your devices.

"We respond to the market very, very quickly. We are working with different customers on different form factors. The key is, whatever the customer needs in order to make the application."

EN: What kind of design software do you use?

Dr. Harari: "We use Cadence software for laying out the chips, we use Synopsys for the controller design. We use various tools, but nothing--our tools are not that advanced. I mean, we're not designing microprocessor chips. This is like 20,000 gates, fully synthesizeable."

EN: Will the flash market continue to diversify in terms of coming out with new and different architectures to serve different parts of the market, and is that something that SanDisk takes a look at?

Dr. Harari: "We think that ATA interface which is a standard for the PC industry, and a standard now for flash storage, is a very simple, high-level interface, very easy. There's really hundreds of thousands of systems engineers that know how to work with it. The overhead environments for reading and writing for an ATA interface are very minimal, very low cost.

"So it may not be the greatest and best, but it really does have an endearing quality, which is that it's very easy to design and it's very low-cost. But it does require a minimum of 44 pins. There are applications where that's too much. So we do see the possibility for serial interfaces that are perhaps simple and that may have other attributes. USB is one example of those. They serve a very good purpose. I would not be surprised to see further extension into serial, perhaps low-performance, low-voltage operation, more towards the 1.8 volts that some communication devices require. So that's an ongoing process.