"I think we will see a decline in memory modules over the next three years, whereas flash is going up in a straight line. I see it becoming our predominant income source in the future," said Kingston Technology's Vaughan Nankivell.

With the advent of SDHC memory cards, promising storage up to 32GB (compared to the SD format, which offers storage up to 2GB), Nankivell promises we can also see microSD and miniSD with much larger capacities in future. Kingston will be rolling out a 4GB microSD and miniSD in the second half of the year.

"Mobile phones, complete with in-built music and video player, email and other functionalities, will drive the flash industry going forward, rather than the digital camera industry," Nankivell said.

But the company will not be forgetting the PC memory market either, claiming that the forward surge in CPU technology "has led to the new wave in memory for consumer desktops and PCs." While the introduction of DDR3 memory, the next generation of RAM, promising greater bandwidth and high data transfer speeds, Kingston says this will account for 25 percent of total DRAM shipments by the end of 2008 and will dominate the market by 2010.

Nankivell also said Kingston is looking into solid state hard drive technology, but is not releasing any products at this time.

See: www.kingston.com