Numonyx CEO Addresses International Electronics Forum

In an industry address at the International Electronics Forum, the chief executive for Numonyx shared his vision for helping the memory segment to successfully rebound and drive new levels of growth.

"The appetite for memory over the years has been seemingly insatiable," said Brian Harrison, chief executive officer at Numonyx. "The key is to create new market opportunities and new sources of demand by delivering products and technologies with new capabilities and new functionality. By that measure, we are well on our way to satisfying the appetite."

Harrison noted that in the 1980s, Numonyx introduced the very first flash memory technology, called NOR flash. It provided a new function called electrical erase that allowed the contents of the memory to be changed electrically. This new functionality caused a transformation in manufacturing, support and service.

Harrison reported that in the 1990s, mobile telephones were growing rapidly, but were still too big to be truly mobile. The introduction of electrically writeable flash was key in the ability to store code and data in small, thin and light phones. Then a new technique of placing multiple chips in a single package came to market, allowing two, three, six or more memory and logic devices to be combined in the same space or package.

"Obviously the dramatic reduction in cost per bit that has occurred over this time plays a critical role in the explosive growth we've seen, but the innovations that helped bring new features and applications into ever smaller spaces was truly key," said Harrison.

Looking ahead, Harrison said that Numonyx is applying its memory and silicon expertise to new technology advances to deliver new functionality that promises to address solutions to existing problems while also delivering new capabilities. Phase Change Memory - or PCM - has the potential to enable the next wave of advancement.

Harrison used the latency of today's PCM as an example how the technology can transform an application like solid state disks which are increasingly being adopted in enterprise class servers. In the example, Harrison took the ability to randomly grab information stored anywhere in the chip and equate the time it takes to equal to one day. It would take a PCM device one day to read the information. When compared to one of today's SSDs, it would equal 17 days. For a traditional hard drive, however, that random access to the data would take nine years.

Harrison continued the example to say that future generations of PCM and PCM-architectures he called "storage class memory PCM" would only take 30 minutes to access.

"By any definition, PCM is a potentially disruptive force," said Harrison. "This is an area where we truly excel - we are focusing on the things that have made us successful to date: staying close to our customers and delivering innovative memory solutions."

Numonyx designs and manufactures a full complement of integrated NOR, NAND, RAM and Phase Change non-volatile memory technologies and products to meet the increasing needs of customers in the cellular, data and embedded markets.

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