Outspoken ex-Seagate chief executive Bill Watkins has revealed his latest venture – and it's with a firm specialising in flash memory storage for ultra-thin portable devices like notebooks and netbooks.
Despite Watkins' very public denunciation of flash storage technology in laptops during his employment at hard drive specialist Seagate – which saw him state that he “just [doesn't] see the flash notebook selling” - Watkins clearly things that there are advantages to the solid state storage system after all: size.
According to CNet, Watkins' latest employment is as a board member with start-up Vertical Circuits, which specialises in making ultra-thin flash storage for notebooks via a 3D stacking technique which sees chips stacked one on top of the other rather than side by side. Watkins believes that this manufacturing method – despite only removing around 1.6mm of space between memory chips – will pay off big: speaking to the Times, he said he was surprised to learn “how much a Dell or Apple will pay for thinness [...] there's a big difference for them between 2 millimetres and 1 millimetre on some of this stuff.”
Despite Watkins' predictions of greatness, Vertical Circuits hasn't yet turned a profit – however, the company hopes to change that over the “next few quarters.”
Are you surprised at Watkins' U-turn on the feasibility of flash-based notebooks, or did his comments make perfect sense from the perspective of a major player in the mechanical hard drive arena? Hoping that the Vertical Circuits chip-stacking tech will shave millimetres off your next notebook purchase? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Despite Watkins' very public denunciation of flash storage technology in laptops during his employment at hard drive specialist Seagate – which saw him state that he “just [doesn't] see the flash notebook selling” - Watkins clearly things that there are advantages to the solid state storage system after all: size.
According to CNet, Watkins' latest employment is as a board member with start-up Vertical Circuits, which specialises in making ultra-thin flash storage for notebooks via a 3D stacking technique which sees chips stacked one on top of the other rather than side by side. Watkins believes that this manufacturing method – despite only removing around 1.6mm of space between memory chips – will pay off big: speaking to the Times, he said he was surprised to learn “how much a Dell or Apple will pay for thinness [...] there's a big difference for them between 2 millimetres and 1 millimetre on some of this stuff.”
Despite Watkins' predictions of greatness, Vertical Circuits hasn't yet turned a profit – however, the company hopes to change that over the “next few quarters.”
Are you surprised at Watkins' U-turn on the feasibility of flash-based notebooks, or did his comments make perfect sense from the perspective of a major player in the mechanical hard drive arena? Hoping that the Vertical Circuits chip-stacking tech will shave millimetres off your next notebook purchase? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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