IP Detective Work
Hey Aus, do you think you could include in your detective work the task of determining the potential participation in the market of a new flash memory standard invented by Dr. Boaz Eitan of Saifun?
saifun.com
Dr. Eitan seems to be playing it extremely low key and close to the vest, so all we can ascertain is from sketchy media reports, chit-chat message board talk, and some of Dr. Eitan's past patent history. In addition, the CEO of Tower Semiconductor has recently made some interesting statements regarding the Saifun technology and their microFLASH(R) implementation of it, and there were some comments about it made by Dr. Harari in the joint Tower/SanDisk conference call. On the TSEM yahoo message board, it has been suggested that FASL, the joint AMD/Fujitsu venture, is signing up to license Saifun technology...and you do have an idea how big flash memory is to AMD, do you not? Besides, this question does seem to be fairly germane to SanDisk, since SanDisk may potentially own 20% of Tower Semiconductor, which in turn owns 14% of Saifun plus certain manufacturing rights to the technology.
One more thing to include in your investigation, should you accept the task, is an evaluation of the last paragraph of this post messages.yahoo.com ,
where the author writes:
...SSTI's LARGEST product is only 2 megaBITS while DOC goes up to 288 mega BYTES, that the ratio of BYTES to BITS (in this case) is 4:1 (we discussed all this before including 4882, 4886, 4887, 5214) and pointed out that FLSH's NAND products write at speeds of 24 mega(million)BYTES per second ... while SSTI's NOR flash writes at speeds rated in kilo(thousand)BITS per second. This advantage will be insurmountable in applications involving mass data transfers such as 3G wireless devices, smartphones, IAD devices and the Internet Infrastructure market. Hasn't anyone noticed that SNDK's LATEST and LARGEST investments... with Toshiba in Virginia and Tower in Israel have been departures from their all NOR flash position? Can you now guess why?
Regards,
thecalculator |
