With the news that NEC Corp is to start making the things, the non-volatile Flash memory chips can be said to have come of age. NEC says it plans to start producing Flash chips by the end of this year, with an initial target of 1m 4M-bit and 8M-bit parts a month, but the company plans to leap to much more valuable 256M- bit parts in the second half of next year: that would enable a single-chip PC Card to store 32Mb, but a card typically has eight of the chips. Even a 256Mb PC Card would not be an immediate threat to 1.8 disk drives, because bit for bit, Flash still costs significantly more than disk drives. Since the market for 16M-bit dynamics is sluggish, NEC will use some of its dynamic lines to make Flash.NEC’s 256M-bit Flash chips are being developed with SanDisk Corp.
