Last week’s FMS conference, originally the Flash Memory Summit, but now the Future of Memory and Storage, saw a strong return of the show’s original excitement and attendance, with numerous presentations on key new technologies, largely AI and CXL, and crowds similar to those before the pandemic. FMS is held in early August every year in Santa Clara, California.
The new name is meant to match the show’s content better than it has in the past, since emerging memories and storage at all levels have been a big part of the show for a number of years, despite the name Flash Memory Summit. With the new name: Future of Memory and Storage, the show now legitimately covers these markets while expanding into DRAM, a field that wasn’t covered by any show for some time, despite the importance of the DRAM market. DRAM accounts for about 20-30% of the entire semiconductor market, depending on the status of the industry: In “Boom” years DRAM’s share goes up, while in “Bust” years its share declines.
While the show’s administration works busily to upload videos of most of the keynotes, other staffers are sorting through the hundreds of presentations to offer downloadable PDFs of the majority of the show’s slides. Since The Memory Guy couldn’t be everywhere at once, I know that I will be looking at a number of these over the coming weeks. I’ll share new and interesting things that i learn from these.
Four of the presentations at FMS were my own, covering AI DRAM (largely HBM) along with analyst Mark Webb, emerging memories with IEEE president Tom Coughlin, a market update, and an outlook for CXL. My HBM presentation previewed an Objective Analysis report that will be published later this month, and my CXL presentation was derived from a report that was only recently released. More on the CXL report in a post late this week.
While I won’t cover the specifics of the keynotes, I will point out that all the major memory manufacturers and key SSD & SSD controller makers presented their new technologies and outlooks for the future, along with a couple of intriguing newer companies like Neo Semiconductor and Kove. Neo, who gave keynote presentations about novel 3D NAND and DRAM architectures at prior FMS shows, provided a look at an interesting 3D neural network. Kove made a presentation about software that’s actually been in production systems for a few years, but that is hardly known, even inside the industry. The company is working hard to change that. Kove’s software makes all the memory in any kind of network flexibly available to servers elsewhere, even on the other side of the earth.
After attending Wednesday’s FMS keynotes and sessions, where I was exposed to numerous AI-related prognostications, I was invited to a reception that Kioxia hosted at a nearby driving range. I found it amusing that an advertisement there touted a new kind of golf club called the “AI Smoke!” This reminded me of an earlier time when radial automobile tires were just gaining popularity in the US, displacing the bias-ply tires that were the former favorite. One car stereo maker tried to take advantage of the radial frenzy that had taken over the US by introducing a “Radially Tuned” stereo system. Now you can buy AI golf clubs.
I should also mention that another important conference overlapped FMS a bit early in the week. The Magnetic Recording Conference, TMRC, was held in Berkeley, California, only about an hour’s drive away. This show covers all aspects of magnetics, from HDDs and sensors to MRAM. AI was a big theme in this conference as well, but the presentations I found most interesting were those given by Everspin and Avalanche, two companies that currently ship discrete MRAM chips. Everspin showed examples of SSDs and autos that take advantage of MRAM, while both Everspin and Avalanche told of spacecraft designed using MRAM thanks to its insensitivity to radiation. There’s a Memory Guy blog post about why that’s important.
The two shows provided a wealth of information, and time will tell of the success of the two key technologies, AI and CXL, that seemed to be a part of nearly every presentation at both conferences. Naturally, Objective Analysis is helping our clients to sort through the many strategic options that these technologies present. Please contact us if you’d like to discuss how we can help your company achieve success in today’s changing marketplace.