 I'm Peter Burris, welcome to another Cube Conversation from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, California. In this conversation, we're going to build upon some other recent conversations 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 the Cube. I'm Peter. So I'm going to give you my perspective. I think this is pretty broadly held generally is that as a technology gets more broadly adopted, people gain experience with it. And as 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 that 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 is 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 EMC memory, it's a low power memory is designed for like smartphones that aren't plugged in. And so when you see smartphones, 1.5 billion smartphones, it drives that technology and then 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 specialized ways. Brian, tell us a little bit about that. So it's interesting that these days no one's really talks about the original NAND flash that was ever developed back in 1987. And that was based on a single-level cell or SLC technology, which today still offers the highest reliability and fastest performing NAND advice 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've got your printers, you've got 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 look, 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 navigations, of waste recognition, instrument clusters, more 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've seen for automotive is it's basically adopting the type of memory that you have in your smartphone. So smartphones have a long time have used this, what I call this EMMC memory, and that has migrated its way into automotive. And now, as smartphones 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. They need to take advantage of that higher performance, the higher densities. And so, Toshiba, 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 the 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 a set of applications starting to impact how others envision how their consumer products can be made better, better experience, safer, et cetera, in other domains? Well, yeah, I mean, we see that all kinds of applications are taking advantage of these technologies, like even ARVR, 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 other applications are taking advantage of that, including automotive. And if you look at automotive, it's not just within the vehicle. Actually, it's estimated, projected that autonomous vehicles, we need like one to three 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 because you basically need to learn from that to improve the software for the autonomous vehicle. Yeah, exactly. 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 that 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 to see a little bit more mundane, just might be a computing device. What does a designer, how does a designer think about how 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 capabilities. 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 nothing about Toshiba's, we do offer a broad product breadth that produces all types of nonvolta 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-NAN, that's at a one gigabit density. And then it maxes out of a 32 gigabit dye. And then 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 dye, 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, one terabyte. And in particular, for a lot of these mobile devices, like I mentioned, UFS is really where things are going and continuing to advance that technology, continuing to increase their performance, continuing to increase the densities. And so, and that enables a lot of applications we actually are hard to envision at this point. I mean, we know autonomous vehicles are important. I'm really excited about that because I'm in need of that when I'm 90 and I can't drive to where I want everyone to go. But, 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 and 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 generally computing, especially some of these applications we're talking about where 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 of 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, well, 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 or the reliability of a particular block of memory. And I think, as users are 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 touch that? Yeah, I mean, we continue to figure out how to cram more bits within a given space. So, you know, moving from SLC to MLC to TLC to 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, a handheld device, you're not going to plug in, you give up some performance for less power. And so there's a whole spectrum and 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 again. That's right, Toshiba tries to have the full breadth of products available. All right, 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. Thank you. And this closes this CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris. Until next time, thank you very much for watching.