How memory and storage innovation is increasingly crucial to the transformation of the industry

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The following comments are from Chris Jacobs, vice president of marketing at Micron Technology’s integrated business unit, and Chris Moore, vice president of marketing at Micron’s mobile business unit. They have been slightly modified for length and clarity.

How are Micron’s customers changing the way they think about data?

Chris Moore: We’re hearing a lot of excitement around 5G – it’s here and it’s spreading around the world, bringing with it more bandwidth and lower latency. Smartphones are the first devices to take advantage of 5G capabilities, creating an improved user experience in areas such as virtual reality, augmented reality and multimedia streaming. However, the most exciting aspect of 5G is that it is designed for more than just smartphones, connecting billions of edge infrastructure endpoints across a range of industries.

Chris Jacobs: The growing ubiquity of 5G connectivity allows us to extend AI capabilities into new locations, and customers are moving compute, memory and storage resources closer to data sources to maximize the value and impact of that data. . We like to call it the smart edge. Customers are taking new approaches to how and where we place computing infrastructure, enabling transformative applications such as autonomous vehicles, smart communities and smart factories.

How is Micron helping address the data challenges in these industries?

Jacobs: It all starts with a deep collaboration with our customers and partners to better understand the requirements of their solutions and how Micron’s innovative memory and storage technologies can help them succeed. We work with customers through direct collaborations. This enables us to deliver products and technologies built around customer needs, with features such as robustness, reliability, longevity, energy and space efficiency, performance and connectivity to other devices or from the edge to the cloud.

Moore: One consideration is that customers typically already use AI to excel in these types of data-intensive applications. Artificial intelligence requires a lot of computing power, but the increase in demand comes at a price, which is why it’s imperative that smartphones and other Internet of Things devices or peripheral devices are as efficient as possible. We focus heavily on this in both our low-power dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and managed NAND solutions, to help our customers maximize battery life.

How are customers using Micron technology to address these markets and opportunities?

Moore: We have excellent partnerships with all major mobile device manufacturers. Photography is one of the use cases driving smartphone buying decisions, and AI is actually helping us all become great photographers. We helped Xiaomi Inc. bring the world’s first phone with LPDDR5 memory to market. The additional memory performance and bandwidth provided by LPDDR5 over the previous generation LPDDR4 are critical to enabling computational photography and other AI-based applications.

Jacobs: Our automotive and industrial customers often prioritize features such as robustness (that is, thermal or vibration tolerances) and efficiency (both power and space) when building their solutions. In the automotive industry, Autotalks credits the energy efficiency and thermal tolerances of Micron’s memory with enabling its Vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) cellular systems, capable of detecting objects through obstacles and at a greater distance than existing technologies .

Another great example that hinges on the performance and low latency characteristics of Micron memory comes from Uhnder Inc., which says its digital imaging radar offers better resolution and contrast than analog radar solutions, providing an opportunity to improved road safety through the improved ability to detect moving or standing objects, large or small, both at short and long distances. For the industrial market, the solutions provided by Kontron are built on a Micron memory and storage foundation and enable applications such as quality inspections using visual artificial intelligence and intelligent manufacturing robotics.

How do you see Micron evolving requirements for these markets in the coming years?

Moore: We see users continue to want to integrate everything they do on their phones more instantly and seamlessly. Examples of this include advanced photos, high-resolution real-time gaming, and using artificial intelligence to create a personalized experience for each individual user, all while maintaining or even extending battery life. This means that more bandwidth and more capacity is needed using less power.

Jacobs: The greater your ability to quickly store and analyze data, the greater the opportunity to derive critical information from that data. Autonomous vehicles are a great example. You need advanced computing resources to make it a reality, a real data center on wheels, but this use case can truly transform people’s lives. Or consider automated weld inspections in a smart factory, which require significant AI resources but can yield huge quality and efficiency gains. To provide these capabilities, capacity and performance are required within a confined space.

Any final thoughts?

Jacobs: We have been a trusted partner in sectors such as automotive and industry for years. We are proud that our commitment to these markets has enabled us to gain the highest market share in the automotive sector and to be a leader in industrial IoT as well. I say this because we have seen several changes in those years, but the biggest changes are yet to come and will require innovative memory and storage solutions. Micron, with its global customer labs, leading innovations and partnerships in a diverse ecosystem, can help customers navigate these new waters.

Moore: It’s an exciting time to be in the memory and storage industry. As the worldwide dependence on data-driven information continues to grow, Micron’s experience and role in the memory and storage industry is becoming increasingly essential. Micron has never been better positioned to deliver a technology portfolio that will unlock unprecedented innovation in the industry.

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