Denali MemCon: Huge Hit in a Tough Market

Denali's 2009 Edition of MemCon, its Annual Storage and Memory-Only Conference held 22-24 June in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, drew approximately 1150 attendees over three days. After Monday's Denali 'Product Tutorial and Training Sessions', which drew more than 250 attendees, the formal MemCon presentation sessions followed on Tuesday and Wednesday, with nineteen presentations and four panel sessions filling the two days, from 9am until past 6pm.

Fortunately for the memory industry, signs of recovery have been apparent for about the last two or three months, so there was reason for business optimism. But, no matter how much the profits and headcount of Silicon Valley's corporations have been impacted during this worst-ever downturn, new ideas and technical advances just keep on coming. This year's theme, "Beacons of Innovation", was apropos, and MemCon brought new products and technologies to the fore, and improved understanding to more mature discussions and products.

Now nearly forty years old, the 'semiconductor memory industry' is hardly maturing. The industry's future, the technical and standards roadmaps, and the issues are as hotly debated as ever they were, albeit at line geometries that are 100 or 1000 times smaller, and costs that are 100 or 1000 times larger. And, we should add here, risks that are also 1000 times larger. In chips, everything scales up, or scales down!

The full MemCon agenda can be found at www.denali.com/memcon

My favorite take-aways and impressions:

SSD talk; still talk: The topic of SSDs has been a mainstay at Denali's MemCon for about four years, often viewed as the Next Big Thing and market driver for NAND Flash. Indeed, one might surmise that SOME substantial fraction of the est. $35B invested in NAND manufacturing capacity in 2005-08 was exactly for the purpose of supplying that market demand. But with still weak take-up of SSDs from netbooks, to laptops through desktops, and onward to the enterprise market, the bloom is off the rose more than a little, to hear what most speakers were saying: the message is still positive, but manufacturers are clearly disappointed with the size and commitment to today's bona fide "SSD" business level, and probably tomorrow's SSD market outlook. NAND prices are still way too high compared to HDDs, despite declines of 50-60% per year for those same past five or so years. No sooner than one technical 'whattabout' raises it head, and is resolved, than another shows up to again retard the significant adoption of SSDs in the top-to-bottom computer line up. To the rescue, to continue the march to improved storage performance economics, come more improved caching systems (see Denali CTO Mark Gogolewski's talk), more software tools and a better understanding of system 'usage models', which get more out of less. This evolutionary process, without huge leaps into the SSD unknown, nor buy-in of fast evolving, expensive and (some say) unproven technologies, is making the transition to total solid state both more measured, but also less risky.

Still today, big unknowns still lie ahead for SSDs (or, as it were, the 'known unknowns' like "what will be the cost, and performance impact of x4 cells and sub-25nm processing?), just as the industry probably under-appreciated the issues it would face in displacing a significant fraction of those HDDs that were in computers, from the vantage point of back in 2004 and 2005.

Performance NVM market: In fact, even though ONFI has been here for several years, and toggling for only slightly less, the high speed NAND flash market is still in its infancy. It is still viewed as having undiminished promise to deliver NAND and SSD bandwidth in multiples of what is widely available today. Ed Doller, in his kick-off keynote, showed a slide of today's NVM applications, dominated today by NAND, in which a huge fraction of the GB lodged in low-performance end of the spectrum: USB cards, DSC chips, Compact Flash, MP3 players. No wonder they can use x3 cells, with sometimes 10K or even 1K write cycles endurance.

There remain strong believers in a high-end promise of the fundamental NAND technology, which includes the vast majority of NAND-based SSDs, as well as heretofore unrecognized applications. Indeed, much of the Performance NAND effort today is truly pathfinding and technology development, and every week brings a new product announce which sets a new high standard for R/W performance, endurance or cost-performance. All in all, 'Performance NAND' is just getting started, with standards, technical capabilities, and applications all evolving lock-step to exploit what is widely felt to be NAND's huge performance and low-cost potential..

Almost from the beginning, no matter how much the talk was of HDD/vinyl/tape displacement markets, it was recognized that the "NAND-market-fitting" exercise would be comprised of developing its core technical promise, concurrently with developing applications that can project those technical benefits into a product that the market would buy. There has been a constant back-and-forth between NANDers, saying "Here's what we can offer, what we can do"...and users who were seeking to define their uses, and refine their spec and performance needs, to match those of the silicon suppliers.

The devil is in the details: Heading down that same 'spec' and 'performance capability' road, we also heard in Numonyx, EasyCo and others' talks, that software and improved system design can deliver significant improvements in NAND endurance, bandwidth and RW performance...only it is not here yet, and faces an uncertain market--more of the NAND 'Double Do' Problem: what can the silicon do and what does the application need. These are very much two moving targets, with the entire industry trying to sort it out. These several talks posited a new lever that the designer could pull for system performance improvement: delving into the exact details of how the device was to be used, or was being used...'usage models'...and applying more system and silicon knowledge to take advantage of unique features of the application or the silicon.

Repeat after me: Market Fragmentation is coming...or maybe not: If I heard the words "Fragmentation of Product Mix" once, I heard it a hundred times in the course of MemCon. The market needs a more diverse mix of DRAMs and NAND flash to best serve its technical needs and low cost requirements. For markets which place huge pressures on commoditizing their constituent products, and 'terminate with prejudice' any attempt to add bells and whistles, this is a new froce that has to be reckoned with...and we can only wait to see where it comes down. It does not appear that gravity can pull the pieces together, either for NAND or for DDR3 DRAMs. New products, and new applications of available flash and DRAM technology, will appear and be accepted or rejected by the market.

For DDR3 DRAMs it is now, PC DDR3 and DDR3L(V) for 'low voltage', which, instead of the Standard 1.5V, can be 1.35V and maybe eventually 1.2V), plus Low Power DRAMs...LP DRAM, Mobile DDR and LP DDR2, plus Graphics DRAMs (or G DRAMs). For NAND, the SLC of 2004 has become MLC and now soon x3 from some vendors; most expect an eventual x4 cell that can store four bits, with yet t.b.d. performance and cost for the 'degraded sockets'...and another shoot out the top for HS NAND flash: toggle of ONFI interfaces and roadmaps.

Efforts to pull all these contradictory and conflicting trends together, to reduce the product set to a small number of parts, are being thwarted by application trends that need either low cost or high performance, to nearly the exclusion of the other characteristic.

All of that is just my 'tip of the iceberg'. There's much more on the Denali MemCon website, www.denali.com/memcon, which has PDFs of all the presentations, actual webcasts of some presentations (with audio), and a MemCon Community website with discussion links to like-minded attendees and others interested in the discussion and topic of this year's MemCon.

Again, we'd like to thank our Platinum Sponsors, Samsung and Rambus, our Gold Sponsor, Numonyx, and our Silver Sponsors, EasyCo, SanDisk and SPMT. We'd also like to thank our track sponsor and Conference Partner, Web-feet Research for their support. We know how scarce funds have been since the fall financial meltdown, and appreciate their continued support.