 I'm Peter Burris, welcome to another Cube Conversation from our awesome Palo Alto studios. Got a great conversation today. We're going to be talking about flash memory, other types of memory, classes of applications, future of how computing is going to be made more valuable to people and how it's going to affect us all. And to do that, we've got Scott Nelson, who's a senior vice president and GM of the memory unit at Toshiba, Memory America, and Doug Wong, who's a member of the technical staff, also at Toshiba, Memory America. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thank you, Peter. Thank you. So here's where I want to start. That when you think about where we are today in computing, in digital devices, et cetera, a lot of that has been made possible by new memory technologies. And let me explain what I mean. For a long time, storage was how we persisted data. We wrote transactions to data and we kept it there so that we could go back and review it if we wanted to. But something happened in the last dozen years or so, it happened before then, but it's really taken off where we're now using semiconductor memory, which allows us to think about how we're going to deliver data to different classes of devices, both the consumer and the enterprise. First off, what do you think about that and what's Toshiba's association with these semiconductor memories been? Why don't we start with you? So appreciate the observation and I think that you're spot on. So roughly about 35 years ago, Toshiba had the vision of a non-volatile storage device. So we brought to market, we invented NOR flash in 1984 and then later, the market wanted something that was higher density. So then we developed NAND flash technology, which was invented in 1987. So that was kind of the genesis of this whole flash revolution that's really been disruptive to the industry as we see it today. So it ended up, it didn't start off in like large data centers, it started off in kind of almost unassuming devices associated with particular classes of file. What were they? So it was very disruptive technology. So the first application for the flash technology is actually replacing audio tape and a phone answering machine. And then it evolved beyond that into replacing digital film, kept going replacing cassette tapes. And then if you look at today, it enabled the thin and light that we see with the portability of the notebooks and the laptops, the mobility of content, with our pictures, our videos and our music. And then today, the smartphone, that really wouldn't be able to, that wouldn't be without the flash technology that's necessary, that gives us all of the high density storage that we see. So Doug, this suggests a pretty expansive role of semiconductor related memory. Give us a little sense of kind of a, where is the technology today? Well, the technology today is evolving. So, you know, originally floating gate flash was the primary type of flash that we created. It's called two-dimensional planar floating gate flash. And that existed, you know, that was from the beginning all the way to maybe 2015 or so. But it was not possible to really shrink flash any further to increase the density. So that's the trend. In the 2D form. In the 2D form, exactly. So we actually had to move to a 3D technology. Now Toshiba presented the first, world's first research papers on 3D flash back in 2007. But at that time, it was not necessary to actually use 3D technology at that time. When it became difficult to increase the density of flash further, that's when we actually moved to production of our 3D flash memory, which we call Bix flash. And Bix stands for Bit Column Stacked Flash, and that's our trade name for our 3D memory. So we're now in 3D memory technology because we're creating more data and the applications are demanding more data both for customer experience and new classes of applications. So when we think about those applications, I mean Toshiba used to have to go to people and tell them how they could use this technology. And now you've got an enormous number of designers coming to you. Doug, what are some of the applications that you're anticipating, hearing about that's driving the demand for these technologies? Well, beyond the existing technology or the applications such as personal information appliances like laptops and portables, and also of course in data centers, which is actually a large part of our business as well, we also see emerging technologies as becoming eventual large users of flash memory, things like autonomous vehicles or augmented or virtual reality or even the emerging IoT infrastructure necessary to support all these portable devices. So these are technologies, or these are devices that currently aren't using the large amounts of flash, but are going to be in the future, especially as the flash memory gets more dense and less expensive. So there's an enormous range of applications on the horizon going to drive greater demand for flash, but there's some business challenges of achieving that demand. We've seen periodic challenges of supply, price, volatility. Scott, when we think about Toshiba as a leader and sustaining that kind of good flow of technology into these applications, what is Toshiba doing to continue to satisfy customer demand and sustain that leadership in this flash marketplace? So first off, as Doug had mentioned, the floating gate technology has reached its ability to scale in a meaningful way. And so the other part of that also is the limitation on the dye density. So the market demand for these applications are asking for higher density, higher performance, lower latency type of applications. And so because floating gate has reached the end of its usefulness in terms of being able to scale, that brought about the 3D. And so with the 3D, that gives us our higher density and then along with the performance that enables these applications. So from Toshiba's point, we are seeing that migration that is happening today. So the floating gate is migrating over to the 3D. It's not to say that floating gate demand will go away. There's a lot of applications that require the lower density, but certainly the higher density where you need a dye level of 256, 512 gigabit, even up to a terabit of data, that's where the 3D is going to play. And second to that is really goes into the cat-back. So obviously that requires a significant amount of cat-backs not only on the development, but also in terms of capacity. And that of course is very important to our customers and to the industry as a whole for the assurance of supply. So we're looking, so Toshiba's value to the marketplace is both in creating these new technologies, filling out a product line, but also stepping up and establishing the capacity through significant capital investments in a lot of places around the globe to ensure that the supply is there for the future. Exactly right. Toshiba is the most experienced flash vendor out there. And so we led the industry in terms of the floating gate technology and we are technology leaders. The industry is migrating into the 3D. And so with that, you know, we continue with a significant capital investment to maintain our presence in the industry as a leader. So when we think about leadership, we think about leadership both in consumer markets because volume is crucial to sustaining these investments, generating return. But I also want to spend just a second talking about the enterprise as well. What types of enterprise relationships do you guys envision and what types of applications do you think are going to be made possible by the continued exploitation of flash in some of these big applications that we're building? Doug, what do you think? Well, I think that new types of flash will be necessary for new emerging applications such as AI or instant recognition of images. So we are working on next generation flash technology. So historically, flash was designed for lowest cost per bit. So that's where how flash began to take over the market for storage from hard to strives. But there are a class of applications that do require very low latencies. In other words, they want faster performance. So we are working on a new flash technology that actually optimizes performance over cost. And that is actually a new change to the flash memory landscape. And as you alluded to earlier, there's a lot of differentiation in flash now to address specific market segments. So that's what we're working on actually. Now, generically, these new non-volatile memory technologies are called storage class memories. And they include things like optimized flash or potentially phase change memories or resistive memories. But all these memories, even though they're slower than say the volatile memories such as DRAM and SRAM, they are number one, they're non-volatile, which means they can learn and they can store data for the future. So we believe that this class of memory is going to become more important in the future to address things like learning systems and AI. Because you can't learn what you can't remember. Exactly. I heard somebody say that once. In fact, I've got to give credit. That came straight from Doug. So if we think about looking forward, the challenge that we face ultimately is have the capital structure necessary to build these things, the right relationship with the designers necessary to provide guidance and suggest about the new class of applications and then the ability to consistently deliver into this, especially for some of these new applications as we look forward. Do you guys anticipate that there will be, in the next few years, particular moments or particular application forms that are going to just kick a lot of, or further kick some of the new design, some of the new technologies into higher gears? Is there something, you know, autonomous vehicles or something that's just going to just catalyze a whole new way of thinking about the role that memory plays in computing and in devices? Well, I think that, you know, building off of the, you know, a lot of the applications that are utilizing NAND technology that we're going to see, you know, now we have the enterprise, we have the data center that's really starting to take off to adopt the value proposition of NAND. And then as Doug had mentioned, you know, when we get into the, you know, autonomous vehicle and we get into AI, we get into, you know, VR, a lot of applications to come will be utilizing the high density, low latency that the Flash offers for storage. Excellent. Gentlemen, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Great conversation about Toshiba's role in semiconductor memory, flash memory and future leadership as well. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Scott Nelson is the Senior Vice President and GM of the Memory Unit at Toshiba Memory America, Doug Wong, the member of the Technical Staff at Toshiba Memory America. I'm Peter Burris. Thanks once again for watching theCUBE.