SanDisk is A Part of Western Digital and A Major Player in the Flash Memory Storage Supply

Vivek Tyagi, Director, Business Development & Sales, SanDisk, Western Digital in conversation with PCQuest shared about SanDisk becoming a part of Western Digital and the two OEM products introduced by the organization. The conversation went as follow:

Brief about Products Introduced For OEMs

The discussion began from discussing the products introduced by SanDisk for OEMs. To put more light on the topic Vivek Tyagi, added, “SanDisk is a part of Western Digital and is a major player in the flash memory storage supply. We provide a set of products, like mobile or other OEM’s, while they build a product. So these products are inside the mobile phone. When you buy a mobile phone, particularly if you see Apple phone, you cannot put any micro SD card, but before buying the phone they will specify that it has internal storage of 32GB or 64GB. That is the form of flash, which comes as a semiconductor chip, that has to be attached to the main processor, and then it is onboard inside. In that product line we are announcing, two new generation products, one is, for industry standard called EMMC, which is embedded multimedia card that is the interface standard, how it talks to the processor. The second one is a new standard for high bandwidth called UFS, which is ultra-fast”.

These are the two new products, Western Digital(SanDisk) is announcing the OEM’s. Both the products are available for sampling now.

New Technologies On The Road Ahead

The New Year always comes forth with technologies and innovation to take over the world. Vivek too shared the technologies that we can expect to experience in the coming future.

He quoted, “Couple of new technologies are here! One could be the semiconductor chips, earlier it was used in the flash industry. They were made in 2D NAND flash or 2 dimensional NAND flash. Now, beyond certain density of memory, the industry has reached the point where they are not able to increase the density of the chip. They had to use multiple chips to increase larger size USB or memory. A few years back, SanDisk along with Toshiba invented a new processor or technology called 3D NAND flash”.

He further explained it by stating, “Here you can understand easily like this, earlier when the population density was less, people were making individual houses, but now because of high population density, people have started making high rise buildings. In the same square feet area, more people can stay comfortably. Similarly, we were able to make, 16 or 32GB in one chip, and now we are not able to scale it beyond that because the size of the chip becomes too big. So now we started to stack those 8GB of chips one upon the other, and the thickness is so thin that it doesn’t make any difference in the real electronics that is 3D NAND. It allows us to build very large density chip, so one major breakthrough in this product is 3D. Now because of 3D, we are able to make internal memory up to 256GB”.

“The second breakthrough in technology is, the new interface called UFS that allows you to interchange data between CPU and storage at higher grades; it is like 2.5 times than the previous grades. Now everybody is downloading lots of apps, clicking pictures and videos in HD and they have to store pictures very quickly. Especially some people do burst mode photography, they keep pressing the button to see how many pictures it can take in a shot, that’s only the possible when the interface between your processors and memory is ultrafast. Because unless it stores this picture you would not be able to take the next picture”.

Hence, these two are the major technological breakthroughs that Tyagi talked about.

Expectations From The Indian Market

When asked about Western digital and Sandisk’s expectation from the Indian market, Tyagi commented, “If you see overall, India has become the second largest seller of mobile phone after China in the world. And also according to researchers,  smartphones sales have surged to a point, which has made us the second largest market after China. India has overtaken the U.S. Certainly, India is a Global player that is operating the local brands as well in the mobile phones segment.

“Thus, we are seeing good growth in this segment in India. Last year, there was significant growth for us, in this segment and it will continue to grow as well in 2018. Especially now under ‘Make in India’ initiative, recently government also increased the duties on finished imported. So I feel, that will give further work as an incentive for smartphone makers to begin making phones in India. And then they need to put the memory inside as internal storage takes from India”.

Your Take on AI and its Usage In Future

AI is the talk of the town. It is surpassing every human and the tech industry. It seems it will grow by leaps and bounds. Vivek also mentioned about the role and future of AI, he stated, “AI is added by the smartphone maker, depending on what intelligent data he is going to churn. But both the processors and the memory we are providing has to support the AI or deep learning capabilities for the software writer. The two chips we are announcing are designed to take care of those leads. AI is essentially being able to make sense out of a lot of data that assists in taking some intelligent decisions out of the phone. So now you have the ability to store a large amount of data so that you can see the usage pattern of the consumer. It would further help in making predictive calculations. In the previous generation, products with the maximum storage available were 228GB. Though, now it has gone up 256. For AI and deep learning you need to have local edge calculation or competition capability that would require large bandwidth between CPU and memory so that you are able to move the data rapidly”.

The Conclusory Statement:

In the end, Tyagi stated, “Today’s focus for us is more on the mobile side, but WD as a company is also very focused on enterprise storage as a segment. And data centre is an important segment for us. In Data centre you have both hard drives and flash drive requirements; we are of one of the unique companies that are able to offer the entire huge storage for the data centres”.

He also talked the future increase in data storage requirement, he said, “Then at the automotive conference, we are talking about electric cars, connected cars, autonomous cars. This kind of cars will generate a huge amount of data and they should have local ability to quickly make sense out of the data and take a decision with the help of AI and deep learning. To make this possible, large amount of local storage and edge compute capability will be required. Hence, then the company will be focused on all those segments where large data is being generated”.