If, and it's a Big If, SanDisk has cracked the problem of how to make re-writeable 3-D flash memory, then it has a dilemma: should it license the technology to Samsung?
Samsung is the world's No.1 flash company and SanDisk's most lucrative licensee. The licence agreement between Samsung and SanDisk has one year to run.
SanDisk has to choose whether to risk losing all that licensing lolly, or bank on making more money by keeping its 3-D technology to its itself (and its old pal Toshiba) and manufacturing 3-D flash in the joint venture fab it owns with Toshiba.
Of course Toshiba, the inventor of flash memroy technology, has bet the company on flash. Not just the semiconductor division, but the whole corporation, with a massive fab-building investment.
As part of that bet, Toshiba has said it intends to overtake Samsung as the world's No.1 flash supplier.
That's a tall order with Samsung currently having about 40 per cent market share and Toshiba around 28 per cent.
Clearly, if Toshiba has 3-D re-writeable flash technology and Samsung doesn't, then Toshiba will have a significant advantage over its Korean rival unless, of course, Samsung finds its own route to re-writeable 3-D flash.
A couple of years ago Samsung was talking about making a 1Tb, eight layer flash memory but, at the time, could only manage a 32Gbit, two layer device. Samsung reckons that 3-D technology will be needed in 2010.
By then, it is thought, the oxides involved in 22nm processes will be too thin to allow traditional floating gate flash technology to work.
SanDisk says it has budgeted $600 million for 2009 and 2010 for equipment to make 3-D chips.
This is a race to develop technology against a brutal timescale which, if not met, could cause industrial mayhem.
It's the semiconductor industry at its most dramatic.
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