Almost since its inception, the memory market has been in a state of crisis. In most instances, this has been due to the inability of makers either to supply enough bits or MB, or the inability of the market to absorb as many as are spewing from the world's memory factories, causing precipitous price declines and baths of red ink for memory makers. In the past decade, we've seen far more of the latter than the former: for most players, the memory industry is notorious for the rate at which it burns capital with meager returns. It is likely that, overall, the 'memory industry' has lost money since 1996.

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Beginning within the past several years, however, we may be seeing something different. Driven by new markets and their new 'most appropriate' memory technologies, and fueled by immense price declines as well as a host of system imperatives that will be driving new memory technical directions as well as economics, memory is now exciting in a way that had almost been forgotten.

The said-to-be maturing PC market continues to wrack up 10-13% unit growth coupled with 30%+ increases in MB per system, but is heading directly into conflict with the 'consumer visual systems' of HDTV, game consoles, and portable and smaller form-factor options. A whole new class of applications for NAND flash in audio and video systems, as a substitute for CD, tape, DVD and HDD storage applications, is driving standards setting, innovation, cost reduction and 'application optimization' in ways we had not seen in mass memory markets since the earlier days of PCs, when on-board caching, standalone L2 caches, and a host of DRAM data-accessing schemes sought to keep the MPU fully occupied.

So, suddenly, memory is interesting again, for technical reasons and not just for the opportunity to make money: Low power DRAMs, integrated memory systems with flash and DRAM, embedded DRAMs, PSRAMs swapped in for SRAMs and SRAMs disappearing onto the main logic ASIC or MPU chip. No one believes one NAND flash spec meets, optimally, all system requirements for all applications...SLC for some, MLC and four-bit for others, varying system tolerance for 'errors.''

At this year's Denali MemCon San Jose, we'll be showcasing many of the leading memory producers, who have come to talk about their view of the memory market's future, what is now available and what is needed by the market, and what they are bringing to the market.

MemCon, 1400 attendees, 3 days of sun and fun... .