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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Allegoria who wrote (12792)	7/11/2000 8:51:53 AM
From: Ausdauer	Respond to of 60323

SSTI has totally confused me. Eric, you posted... July 10, 2000-- SSTI today announced that it has entered the embedded mass data storage market with the introduction of a flash memory-based ATA-Disk Chip (ADC) product family. Utilizing the company's proprietary SuperFlash® technology for the ATA controller, SST's ADC is the industry's first ATA/IDE protocol-compatible solid-state mass data storage product housed in a multi-chip packaged device. [Emphasis on "multichip"] The July 7, 2000 press release reads as follows... With the introduction today of the flash-memory-based ATA-Disk Chip (ADC) family, SST enters the embedded mass-storage market, offering what the company claims is the first single-chip solid-state IDE disk-drive replacement. [emphasis on "single-chip"] WHICH IS IT THEN?????????????????? _________________________________________________________________________________ I still have those three questions on the back of my mind which require clarification. It would be very enlightening to learn exactly how SSTI has achieved this single-chip solution when a 64MB flash chip would likely require mulitple units of stand-alone flash in addition to the controller they have developed. The clear message, IMHO, is that SSTI is going after FLSH. That was my original impression when I read the July 7, 2000 report and it is still my impression today. The simple reason is that the end-user devices are most similar to the markets FLSH serves, if not identical. 1) Does SSTI manufacture its own variety of high density flash through a fab parter. 2) Is SuperFlash suitable for MLC? 3) Is Nakhimovsky a double agent for SanDisk? I still believe Nakhimosvsky loves SanDisk. The product cycle lives he mentions tell the whole story, as does his fascination with smaller form factor removable flash that SSTI currently does not produce... Message 14015653 "While embedded flash made the camera design cheaper (you didn't need to include expensive flash-card interface sockets and connectors), it didn't allow for future upgrades. Consumers, however, quickly showed their preference for removable flash cards, which make data exchange easy. In addition, flash cards provide simple operation and the ability to upgrade to higher capacities. So flash cards have gained acceptance in a multitude of digital devices. Only lower-end "kid cam" digital cameras use embedded flash." "The digital camera market is currently the biggest consumer market for flash-memory cards. Not surprisingly, the digital camera market follows the PC paradigm, with short product life cycles and almost instantaneous product obsolescence—a wildly different situation than the conventional film-camera market, where the same camera can be sold for a number of years and product improvements are incremental. As with the PC market, flash memory is the key enabling technology for product design and manufacturing." Ausdauer