The rotating memory market is now becoming such a commodity affair that the leading players are casting around for related products that might carry a higher premium for a few years, and Milpitas, California-based Quantum Corp has joined forces with Silicon Storage Technology Inc to diversify into the solid-state storage market – an area that, in the medium term, threatens Quantum’s lower-end disk drives. The agreement signed this month includes an undisclosed equity investment by Quantum in the Sunnyvale-based Silicon to seal a deal under which the two will co-operate in the areas of marketing, sales, product development and manufacturing, merging Quantum’s storage technology expertise with Silicon’s patented Flash memory cell structure and chip architecture to develop products for the PCMCIA card-based storage market.
