Silicon Valley Flash Memory Summit Showcases Latest Tech for Data

Ilene Eng
By Ilene Eng
August 8, 2019Science & Tech
share

In an era where people are constantly demanding faster, cheaper, and more reliable ways to store their data, the industry has to keep up to meet consumers’ needs and expectations.

The 14th annual Flash Memory Summit was held on August 6-8 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California. Companies showcased their latest developments in flash memory and solid-state storage across different industries.

“Every year there’s some development, higher speeds, new way of packaging, flash drives, solid-state memory,” said Chip Stockton, CEO of Conference Concepts and owner of Flash Memory Summit.

The record number and quality of entries made the judging process very difficult. Awards chairman, Jay Kramer said, “In some cases, the judging was so close, we’ve awarded co-winners.”

NTD Photo
Innodisk displays its Fire Shield SSD that can withstand temperatures up to 800 degrees Celsius on August 6, 2019. (Jeffery Chen/NTD)

Innodisk protects data from temperatures as high as 800 degrees celsius.

“We provide a fire shed SSD to our customer,” said George Chang, product manager at Innodisk.

It can be used in aerospace or military applications.

NTD Photo
Microchip Technology shows the smaller and improved chip with more memory channels on August 6, 2019. (Jeffery Chen/NTD)

Developers at Microchip created a product that increases memory bandwidth for processors and similar applications.

“We’ve announced a partnership with IBM, the IBM Power9 processor. And so our product is used in association with that to increase the number of memory channels they can achieve by 4x,” said Jay Bennett, product marketing manager at Microchip.

Since 2016, we have been in an era of the Zettabyte, a size equivalent to a billion Terabytes, or a trillion Gigabytes.

“It’s amazing how much data is being generated on a daily basis. They say the autonomous cars are going to generate a Terabyte of data on a daily basis,” said Stockton.

NTD Photo
Western Digital showcases its embedded flash for the automotive industry on August 6, 2019. (Jeffery Chen/NTD)

Here’s Western Digital’s latest solution for data centers.

“This allows a data center to have a lot more flexibility in terms of how much storage they want and how big or small they need for a form factor,” said Laurie Iwami, an outbound marketer at Western Digital.

NTD Photo
Toshiba shows their latest and smallest form factor for SSDs that can be easily removed without damaging the card on August 6, 2019. (Jeffery Chen/NTD)

Toshiba also covers a spectrum of applications.

“These are the kinds of drives you would find in ultra-thin tablets or PC’s, and even gaming systems. And then over here we have NVMe drives that can go directly into servers … and also drives here NVMe at the perfect SAS level that are perfect for the data center,” said Alex Mei, VP Marketing at Toshiba.

They also created the smallest form factor for SSDs with a capacity of around 1 Terabyte that can be easily replaced, rather than being soldered on.

“If you want to put on thermal application on your device, you don’t have to do it on the card, you can do it on the connector so you don’t have to damage the card,” said Ivan He, technical marketing engineer at Toshiba.

From automotive to marketing, to business, flash memory will continue to shape the way industries store large amounts of data.

ntd newsletter icon
Sign up for NTD Daily
What you need to know, summarized in one email.
Stay informed with accurate news you can trust.
By registering for the newsletter, you agree to the Privacy Policy.
Comments