‘Nand-flash prices are stabilizing’

Thanks to a decline in production combined with further increasing demand, the price of flash memory should stabilize in the coming months. That memory for SSDs, among other things, has fallen sharply in price in recent months.

Price stabilization should already be visible in July, website Digitimes reports. This concerns the prices of the nand chips, which are used in, among other things, solid state drives, USB flash drives and as storage medium in tablets, smartphones and ultrabooks. By cutting production in factories, a process already underway, prices would no longer fall as sharply as they have in recent months. That, combined with an expected increase in demand for flash products, should bring about stabilization.

One of the driving factors in the growing demand for nand chips would be Intel’s new processor generation Ivy Bridge: the chipsets of the corresponding motherboards, the Series 7 chipsets, have support for USB 3.0 on board as standard. That would stimulate the sale of USB drives with a USB 3.0 interface, up to the end of 2012, about twenty percent of the flash drives have this connection. Rising sales of tablets, smartphones and ultrabooks are also contributing to the demand for nand chips.