OK, to be honest, ending the year with a Top 10 List is not very, um, well, innovative. But it’s what’s on our list that’s innovative. And the year 2009 for Micron and Lexar Media can be summarized like this: Bigger. Faster. Better.

So, that’s our Top 10 list for 2009, innovatively reduced to three memorable points.

Still not ready to let go of tradition? Then, on with the Micron and Lexar Top 10 Innovations of 2009 countdown:

1. Maximizing Capacity – Crucial 4GB DDR3-1333MHz Memory Module
Yes, bigger is better. Memory hogs of the world rejoiced when Crucial announced its 4GB DDR3-1333MHz (PC3-10600) non-ECC UDIMM memory module. It allows power users to max out their systems with up to 24GB of computer memory.

2. Color Me Fast – Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB DDR3-1600
Not only do the Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB DDR3-1600 memory modules use Intel Extreme Memory Profiles (XMP) for easy overclocking, they also come with stylish red, blue or green heat spreaders and matching LEDs. Now, if only your socks matched.

3. 600X and Be There – Lexar’s 600x Professional CompactFlash cards
With an industry leading 600X (90MB/s) guaranteed minimum sustained write speed and the reliability of Image Rescue software, Lexar remains the professionals’ preferred high-performance memory card.

4. Socially Aware – Lexar High-Speed microSDHC Card
The introduction of Lexar’s High-Speed microSDHC Card kit brought an easier, faster way for mobile-device users to upload photos, videos, music and files from their handhelds to their host computers and share them with friends through social media channels. Named the “Shining Star” in the MobileVillage Mobile Star Award program in the portable storage hardware category, the card and accompanying side-load software ushered in a new market where data can be shared easier than ever before.

5. Is it safe? – Lexar JumpDrive SAFE S3000/SAFE S300 FIPS
More than ever, security standards were a priority for enterprise organizations and government agencies in 2009 and the Lexar JumpDrive SAFE S3000 and JumpDrive SAFE S3000 FIPS were the first to incorporate smart card-based encryption technology to deliver secure, manageable portability to organizations that must meet strict security regulations.

6. Big Performance, Small Size – Micron 34nm NAND and Lexar memory cards
In June, Lexar announced the inclusion of Micron’s 34nm NAND flash memory across a number of product lines. By including the award-winning 34nm NAND technology in its memory cards and flash drives Lexar is able to offer industry-leading products with high performance at a more cost effective price point—a differentiator the company continues to focus on as it heads into 2010.

7. Serious Endurance – Enterprise NAND
Micron’s MLC Enterprise NAND provides a viable alternative to standard SLC NAND that allows enterprise applications the ability to cost-effectively and reliably double storage capacity (since MLC provides twice the storage space in the same die size as SLC). The new MLC Enterprise NAND chip is able to reach 30,000 write cycles (6x the reliability of standard MLC NAND).

8. The incredible shrinking chip – 3 bit-per-cell
Micron and Intel teamed up through their joint venture, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), to roll out the industry’s smallest and most cost effective 32Gb 3 bit-per-cell (bpc) NAND chip for flash cards and USB devices. Made on its leading 34nm process technology, the 3bpc product demonstrates the companies’ continued progress in NAND development. Stay tuned for more on Micron and Intel’s next NAND milestone—a new 2Xnm NAND process will be announced in early 2010.

9. Seeing Pico-Projection in a Whole New Light – FLCOS Microdisplays
In 2009 we saw pico projection begin to make significant headway in the consumer electronics space. Micron also got active in this space in 2009, acquiring innovative FLCOS microdisplay technology. Our high-speed FLCOS microdisplays create vibrant, sharp images from a tiny, low-power chip, so they’re perfect for mobile devices. If you want to see FLCOS technology in action, check out the 3M MPro120—one of the year’s best pico-projector offerings.

10. RealSSD C300 – The Industry’s Fastest SSD
The year culminated with Micron unveiling its C300 RealSSD Solid State Drive. This is no ordinary SSD, the C300 took the title of the fastest notebook and desktop SSD in the industry. And don’t just take our word for it, these benchmark videos show the drive in action. In addition, it’s the first SSD to use a SATA 6Gb/s interface, which provides twice the bandwidth of the standard SATA 3Gb/s interface.

Chris Smith: Eric, thanks for talking with me today. I’ve noticed that Micron has been focusing more and more energy on the mobile market. Today, the company introduced a new line of MCPs; could you tell me a bit about these products?

Eric Spanneut: We are announcing the adoption of our latest process technologies—both NAND and DRAM—to our line of high-end MCPs. It means that we have leveraged our 34nm single-level cell (SLC) technology on the NAND side, as well as our 50nm technology on the low-power DRAM side.

Chris: Is this the first 50nm designed into your MCP products?

Eric: This is our first monolithic 2Gb LPDRAM, which is being adopted by our MCP product line.

Chris: What range of the mobile market will these MCPs serve?

Eric: These products will serve the high-end feature phone market, and the smart phone market that uses open operating system like Windows Mobile, Android, or Symbian, as well as the nascent mobile internet device (MID) market.

Chris: I notice that this MCP uses LPDDR, but I know you manufacture LPDDR2; when will you transition this MCP to LPDDR2?

Eric: We see growing interest in LPDDR2, but first adoption by handset vendors won’t happen until second half of 2010. We expect LPDDR to be the front-runner in terms of volume for the next three to four years. That said, when the transition does begin, handset vendors will recognize significant advantages with LPDDR2, including reduced pin count, higher frequency and a better power budget.

Chris: So, if LPDDR2 has these benefits, why isn’t it being widely adopted at this time?

Eric: The mobile value chain is a very complex one with a complex ecosystem. It always takes a long time for a new technology to be massively adopted.

Chris: Back to today’s announcement; I imagine these die are much smaller than the packages that they go into. What are the benefits of using the latest process technology for these die inside the MCPs?

Eric: There are several benefits. The first one is that it allows us to be more competitive in the market place. The second benefit is that we are able to intercept smaller form factors by shrinking the dies. For example, we know that our 2Gb LPDDR can accommodate some small form factor designs that our competition’s LPDDR cannot accommodate. Finally, we want to minimize the number of dies we have in the package. It is better to have a 2Gb monolithic die in a package rather than two 1Gb monolithic die—not only because of cost, but also because of power and system optimization.

Chris: Will you provide different MCP densities?

Eric: Yes. We will start with 4Gb NAND and 2Gb LPDDR, and we’ll introduce higher densities-–up to 8Gb NAND and 8Gb LPDDR – as we see the handset market trend toward greater capacity requirements.

Chris: Do you have to increase package size by going to those higher densities?
Eric: The package size doesn’t change, just the package thickness as you stack more die.

Chris: Tell us about some of the trends you’re seeing in the mobile memory market and what’s driving these trends?

Eric: We see a polarization of the market place with a stronger high-end market and devices like smart phones booming. We also see more and more low-end phones being produced as well as a booming data card market which consumes lots of SLC NAND and low density low-power DRAM.

On the LPDDR side, the high-end market requires higher densities, higher performance and higher frequencies. Micron was actually the first to support 200 megahertz on LPDDR—it’s an important benchmark because certain chipsets require these higher frequencies to operate.    We’re also seeing some initial interest in LPDDR2, even though LPDDR will be the volume leader for several years.

On the NAND side, we see an increasing shift from NOR to NAND. There are a few reasons for this. Largely, the growing requirement for higher densities and multimedia technologies is driving this. Past a certain density, NAND presents a much better cost structure for these requirements. Chipset support is also shifting toward NAND–-the ecosystem is now set up to support the massive adoption of NAND.

There is also increased momentum for high-density embedded MMC (managed NAND) deployment. In the past, handset manufacturers preferred external mass storage to keep their BOM cost low and their architecture flexible. But now, handset vendors see embedded mass storage as a way to differentiate themselves in the high-end part of the market. Density really is a differentiator in the market today.

Embedded MMC should also get further traction with the 4.4 standard which will provide important booting and security features.

Chris: what is the NAND & NOR market breakdown?

Eric: In 2008, NOR still represented a majority of the non-volatile memory shipments in the handset space, while we expect it to only account for about one quarter of these in the 2012 time-frame.

Chris: What is Micron doing to provide extra value to handset manufacturers?

Eric: We work a lot with the entire mobile value chain. We work quite closely with operating system and chipset vendors. We spend a lot of time qualifying our memories with those key players. We also spend a lot of time developing additional software services, which improves the performance and endurance of our products.

All of this shows how much we’re committed to the mobile space and we believe our broader memory portfolio strongly positions us in the marketplace. We’re growing fast in the mobile market, we have had some major successes this year, and this new generation of MCPs really shows how competitive we are.

Chris: Eric, thanks again for your time, we look forward to talking with you again about innovations in the mobile market.

Eric: My pleasure.

Call it another sign the era of mechanical hard drive domination is ending. And another small step toward flash freedom.

“This is the first step, and as good as Windows 7 is for SSDs, it’s still a baby step with so much more potential ahead,” Dean Klein, Micron’s SSD guru and vice president of memory system development told me in an interview.

I wanted to talk to Dean for the SSD perspective on Windows 7 after last week’s conversation with Micron’s Matthias Buchner on what impact Windows 7 will have on DRAM.

Dean was kind enough to break away from his busy schedule developing Micron’s next generation RealSSD™ products to wax evangelical about the breakthrough that Windows 7 represents in designing operating systems that optimize SSD technology, rather than accommodate the shortcomings of the mechanical hard drive.

“We’ve been dealing with the evils of rotating media for 52 years and it’s going to take a long time to unwind that,” he said. “A lot of optimization done in operating systems is just hiding the latencies of rotating media. Now, Windows 7 is the first operating system to show you don’t need to do that anymore.”

What Windows 7 does that’s different than any other current OS is actually detect the presence of an SSD in the system. That’s done through an ATA command called “identify.” Windows 7 then configures itself to work in the background to free up space on the SSD so the drive has more “empty candidates,” or more empty memory blocks in which to store incoming data.

“The actual command Windows 7 is using is called ‘TRIM,’ and it frees up previously used blocks and puts them in the unused block pool,” said Klein. “Think of TRIM as a sort of SSD clean-up utility. When you think of disk clean-up on a mechanical hard drive, you think of defragmentation, where you maximize the locations of empty blocks to have a larger contiguous storage area on the spinning disk. But SSDs are intentionally fragmented because of the movement of data around the NAND to minimize wear.”

In fact, running a typical defrag disk utility on an SSD would actually increase the wear on the drive. When Windows 7 detects an SSD, it disables the traditional mechanical drive defragmentation utility in the OS, and then identifies unused or partially used NAND blocks on the SSD and maximizes the number–-but not the location–-of those blocks for faster SSD read and write speeds, as well as longer endurance.

“When an OS erases a block of data from a drive, it’s typically not actually erasing the data–-it’s just setting an allocation bit in a table somewhere indicating the data is erased and making it unavailable to the user,” said Klein. “The drive does not know that data is erased. So, over time, that lack of data erasure results in an SSD filling up and slowing down, even though the OS thinks there’s a lot of empty space left on the drive.”

Unlike Windows Vista, which drew no distinction between a mechanical SATA hard drive and a SSD, Windows 7 compensates for this and begins to take advantage of the inherent advantages of solid state storage technology, giving SSDs a chance to show users what they really can do.

“Already, there are a lot of discussions going on at Microsoft about what further SSD optimizations can be made in Windows 8,” said Klein. “System designers and OS developers only beginning to take advantage of the true potential that SSDs have.”

Chris Smith: Thanks Matthias for talking with me. I was hoping you could give us some perspective on how the launch of Windows 7 today will impact DRAM demand?

Matthias Buchner:  Sure, happy to talk with you. It’s important that we first look at it from the OS perspective, and then I’ll touch on the DRAM impact. In general, consumers have been waiting for a reason to purchase an upgraded PC for years. Whereas Windows Vista was an evolutionary step, industry insiders believe that Windows 7 is the revolutionary catalyst that will bring would-be PC buyers off of the sidelines and into the PC market.  While I expect that Windows 7 memory content will increase to 4GB from 2GB, I also believe that the launch of Windows 7 will spur DRAM bit growth through increased PC unit sales. Unit growth should be driven by consumers in calendar 2010, followed by the enterprise applications in calendar 2011.

Chris: Do you expect a bigger bounce in memory with the Windows 7 roll-out, compared to Vista?

Matthias: I think it’s important not to compare Vista and Windows 7 because there have not been so many upgrades to Vista. We need to look at it from a perspective of comparing Windows 7 to Windows XP. The expectation now with Windows 7 is that there will be a strong adoption rate, because there hasn’t been anything really new on the PC side for a couple of years, therefore we see a bigger bounce in memory.

Chris: What do you see as the sweet spot for DRAM density in Windows 7-based notebooks? What about netbooks?

Matthias: We see 4GB as the sweet-spot in notebooks with the 2Gb-based DDR3 components spurring this transition, enabling a more cost-efficient way to achieve this density. On the netbook side, most of the systems today are 1GB, I see the density moving to 2GB since with Windows 7 the memory can be expanded. The end-user push will come because netbooks are really used as a secondary notebook, for example, when traveling. Once the consumer is used to the performance of a home computer or notebook, they won’t want to veer too far away from that in terms of performance, so as I mentioned, we see 2GB as the density sweet spot there.

Also, it’s important to point out that for desktops, we see the same transition paths as with notebooks.

Chris: What benefit do denser memory modules provide to these systems?

Matthias: The benefit of denser memory modules will arise as a greater number of applications and drivers for the 64-bit architecture begin hitting the market. Until now, the majority of the software applications written for Windows have been optimized for 32-bit architecture despite the OS and hardware being 64-bit-capable for quite some time. Unlocking the true potential of 64-bit optimized software applications will require additional DRAM, especially if multiple 64-bit applications are being used simultaneously.

Chris: Looking bigger picture, what trends do you see happening in DRAM heading into 2010?

Matthias: 2010 is shaping up to be a big year for DRAM technology transitions. The major trend we see is the conversion from DDR2 to DDR3, as well as the density transition in DDR3 from 1Gb-based modules to 2Gb-based modules. The transition to DDR3 has already started on the server side, but we definitely will see a much stronger conversion to DDR3 in computing next year.

We also see a trend in reducing power consumption, or lowering voltage in the systems. In moving to DDR3 we are getting down to 1.5-volt, and we see going to 1.35-volt as important. Micron was one of the first companies offering 1.35-volt on DDR3.

Additionally, we see a trend around improved performance.  When DDR3 first was introduced it was running at 1066 Mb/s and now we’re at 1333 Mb/s. Next year, in the high-end systems, we’ll be at 1600 Mb/s for DDR3.
And as I mentioned earlier, from the module side, with 2Gb DDR3 gaining traction, we see 4GB memory modules being the sweet spot for density with Windows 7, which provides for a more cost-efficient solution.

Chris: What about graphics memory?

Matthias: We see an opportunity for mainstream memory components to serve a majority of the graphics market. We plan to tailor our mainstream DDR3, optimizing memory performance and driving it to achieve the speeds needed for the graphics side. With Windows 7, we also will see desktop systems with a standalone graphics card, which will benefit from the higher performance and density that new DDR3 components will deliver.

Chris: More than ever, consumers seem interested in making their purchases last; for both environmental and economic reasons. Why should consumers be more comfortable about spending money now on a system with Windows 7 and 4GB RAM?

Matthias: To start, Windows 7 is a superior operating system versus Vista. So those that have been wary about purchasing a new computer, or just happy with what they have, should actually see the immediate benefits with Windows 7. Also, though, the normal PC replacement cycle has been burdened by the economic downturn. When comparing a system purchased by a consumer two, three or four years ago, most entry level systems today will have at least 2x the computing power.  So the consumer not only gets the new OS, but a system with enough computing power to meet their needs for a while. And with a 4GB system today, consumers should feel comfortable being able to easily upgrade their system to a virtually unlimited amount of DRAM for their system. Users can simply purchase additional DRAM as the technological landscape evolves and more and more memory-hungry applications are introduced over time.

Chris: Do you think there is a pent-up demand that could manifest itself with a Windows 7 system within businesses?

Matthias: We should see a big push in Windows 7 adoption for both notebooks and for desktops – either for new systems or upgrades – in the business environment. One of the great advantages of Windows 7 is that it provides a solution not only for the consumer, but also businesses.

Chris: Thanks again for your time and for your perspective on Windows 7, and what we should expect on the memory side.

Matthias: You are welcome