>> Hi I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE
conversation from theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California.
In this conversation we're going to build upon some other
recent conservations we've had which explores this
increasingly important relationship between semiconductor
memory or flash and new classes of applications that are
really making life easier and changing the way that human
beings interact with each other,
both in business as well as in consumer domains.
And to explore these crucial issues we've got two great
guests: Brian Kumagai is the director of business
development at Toshiba Memory America.
Scott Beekman is the director of managed flash at Toshiba
Memory America as well.
Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE.
>> Thank you.
>> So I'm going to give you my perspective,
and I think this is pretty broadly held.
Generally is it as a technology gets more broadly adopted,
people get experience with it and as the designers,
developers, users gain experience with technology,
they start to apply their own creativity and it starts to
morph and change and pull and stretch a technology in a lot
of different directions, and that leads
to increased specialization.
That's happening in the flash world.
Have I got right, Scott?
>> Yes. The great thing about flash is just how ubiquitous it
is and how widely it's used.
And if you think about any electronic device,
it needs a brain, a processor,
it needs to remember what it's doing memory,
and memory's what we do.
And so we see it used in so many applications from
smartphones, tablets, printers,
laptops, streaming media devices.
And so that technology we see used for example like eMMC
memory, it's a low-power memory.
It was designed for smartphones that aren't plugged in.
And so when you see smartphones,
1.5 billion smartphones,
it drives that technology and then it migrates into all
kinds of other applications as well.
And then we see new technologies that come and replace that
like UFS, universal flash storage.
It's intended to be the high-performance replacement to
eMMC and so now that's also migrating its way through
smartphones and all these other applications.
>> So there's a lot of new applications that are requiring
new classes of flash,
but there's still a fair amount of applications that require
traditional flash technology.
These are not coming in and squashing old flash or
traditional flash or other types of parts,
but amplifying their use in special device ways.
Brian, tell us a little bit about that.
>> So it's interesting that these days,
no one really talks about the original NAND flash that was
ever developed back in 1987,
and that was based on a single of a cell or SLC technology,
which today still offers the highest reliability and
fastest-performing NAND device available on the market
today and because of that,
designers have found this type of memory to work well for
storing boot code and some levels of operating system code
and these are in a wide variety of devices,
both in the consumer and industrial segments.
Anything from set top boxes,
connecting streaming video.
You got your printers.
You got the AI speakers.
Just a numerous breadth of products.
>> I got to also believe a lot of IoT,
a lot of industrial edge devices are going to feature a lot of
these kinds of parts.
Maybe disconnected, maybe connected,
but need low power, very high speed,
low cost, highly reliable.
>> That's correct. And because these particular devices are
still offered in lower densities,
it does offer a very cost-effective
solution for designers today.
>> Okay well let's start with one of the applications that is
very, very popular in the press.
Automated driving or autonomous vehicles.
And there's autonomous vehicles but there's
autonomous robots more broadly.
Let's start with autonomous vehicles.
Scott, what types of flash-based technologies are ending up
in cars and why?
>> Okay so we've seen a lot of changes within vehicles over
the last few years.
Increasing storage requirements for infotainment systems,
more sophisticated navigation,
voice recognition, instrument clusters,
informative digital displays,
and then ADAS features.
Collision avoidance, things like that.
And all that's driving more memory storage and faster
performance memory and in particular what we're seeing for
automotive, it's basically adopting the type of memory that
you have in your smartphone.
So smartphones have a long time of using what I call this
eMMC memory and that has migrated its way into automotive.
And now as smartphones have transitioned,
have been transitioning to UFS,
in fact Toshiba was the first
to introduce samples of UFS in early 2013,
and then you started to see it in smartphones in 2015.
Well that's now migrating into automotive as well.
Then you need to take advantage of that higher performance,
the higher densities, and so Toshiba's,
we're supporting this growth within automotive as well.
>> But automotive is a market, and again I think it's a great
distinction you made, it's just not autonomous.
It's the even when a human being is still driving,
it's the class of services that are provided to that driver,
both from an entertainment and safety and overall experience
standpoint is driving us very aggressively forward.
That volume and the ability to demonstrate what you can do
in a car is having significant implications on the other
classes of applications that we think for some of these
high-end parts.
How is the experience that we're incorporating into an
automotive application or set of applications starting to
impact how others envision how their consumer products can
be made better, better experience,
safer, etc, in other domains?
>> Well yeah, I mean we see that all kinds of applications
are taking advantage of these technologies
like even AR/VR for example.
Again it's all taking advantage of this idea of needing
higher, larger density of storage at a lower cost
with low power, good performance,
and all these applications are taking advantage of that,
including automotive.
And if you look at automotive,
it's not just within the vehicle.
Actually it's projected that autonomous vehicles,
we need like 1 to 3 terabytes of storage within the vehicle.
But then all the data that's collected from cameras and
sensors needs to be uploaded to the cloud,
and all that needs to be stored,
so that's driving storage and data centers cause you
basically need to learn from that to improve the software
for the autonomous vehicles.
So all these things are driving more and more storage,
both within the devices themselves.
Like a car is like a device.
But also in the data centers as well.
>> So if we can Brian, take us through some of the decisions
a designer has to go through to start to marry some of these
different memory technologies together to create,
whether it's an autonomous car or perhaps something that's
even a little bit more mundane,
just might be a computing device.
What is a designer, how does a designer think about these
fit together to serve the needs
of the user in the application?
>> I think these days a lot of new products,
they require a lot of features and capability,
so I think a lot of input or thought is going
into the memory size itself.
I think software guys are always wanting to have more
storage to write more code,
that sort of thing.
So I think that is one step that they think about.
Size of the package and then cost is always a factor as
well so the thing about Toshiba is we do offer a broad
product breadth that produces all types of non-volatile
memory that'll fit everyone's needs.
>> So give us some examples of what that product breadth
looks like and how it maps to
some of these application needs.
>> So we, like I mentioned,
we offer the lower density SLC NAND.
That's at a 1 gigabit density.
And then it maxes out of a 32 gigabit die.
And as you get into a more multi-level cell or triple level
cell or QLC type devices,
you're being able to use memory that's up to,
a single die could be up to 1.33 terabits so there's such a
huge range of memory devices available today.
>> And so if we think about where the memory devices are
today and where applications are pulling us,
what kind of stuff is on the horizon, Scott?
>> Well one is just more and more storage for smartphones we
want more 256 gigabyte, 512 gigabyte, 1 terabyte.
And in particular for a lot of these mobile devices,
like I mentioned UFS is really where things are going in
continuing to advance that technology and continuing to
increase their performance,
continuing to increase the densities.
And that enables a lot of applications that we actually
hadn't envisioned at this point.
I mean we know autonomous vehicles are important.
I'm really excited about that cause I'm in need of that when
I'm 90 and I can't drive and telling everyone
where I want to go.
And then AI, where AI is going.
So there's a lot of things though we have some idea now,
but there's things that we can't envision and this
technology enables that.
It enables other people who can see
how do I take advantage of that?
The faster performance, the greater densities,
the lower cost per bit.
>> So if we think about general computing,
especially some of these applications that we're talking
about where the customer experience is a function of how
fast the device starts up or how fast the service starts up
or how rich the service can be in terms of different classes
or input, voice or visual or whatever else it might be.
And we think about these data centers where the closed loop
between the processing and the inferencing of some of these
models and how it affects what that transaction's going to do,
we're talking about lower latency,
and that's driving a lot of designers to think about how
they can start moving certain classes of function closer to
the memory, both from a security standpoint,
from an error correction standpoint.
Talk to us a little bit about the direction that Toshiba
imagines the differentiability of future memories relative,
or memories today relative to where they've been.
How, what kinds of features and functions are being added to
some of these parts to make them that much more robust in
some of these applications?
>> I think as you mentioned the robustness of the memory
itself and I think that actually some current memory devices
will allow you to actually identify the number of bits that
are being corrected and then that kind of gives an
indication on the integrity of the reliability of a
particular block of memory.
And I think as users we're able to get early detection of
this, they can do things to move the data around and then
make their overall storage more reliable.
>> Anything, Scott? Want to add to that?
>> I mean we continue to figure out how to cram more bits
within a given space so moving
from SLC to MLC to TLC and then QLC.
That's all enabling that to enable greater storage,
lower cost and then as we just talked from the beginning,
just there's all kinds of differentiation in terms of
flash products that are really tailored for certain things.
Some are focused for really high performance and you give up
some power and others you need a certain balance of that
where a mobile device, handheld device,
you're not going to plug in.
And you give up some performance for less power.
And so there's a whole spectrum.
Some endurance is incredibly important.
So we have a full breadth of products
to address all those particular needs.
So the designer, it's just whatever I need,
I can come to you guys.
>> Yeah that's right. Toshiba tries to have the full breadth
of products available.
>> Alright. Gentlemen, thank you very much
for being on theCUBE.
Brian Kumagai, director of business development
at Toshiba Memory America.
Scott Beekman, director of managed flash
at Toshiba Memory America.
Again, thanks very much for being on theCUBE.
And this closes this CUBE conversation.
I'm Peter Burris.
Until next time, thank you very much for watching.