However, despite the fact that Matrix had customers for its one-time programmable antifuse-based memory and was reportedly shipping a million chips a month prior to the acquisition, and despite the fact that SanDisk (Milpitas, Calif.) paid about $238 million to acquire Matrix, SanDisk appears to have taken the memory of the market while it works on a reprogrammable version of the antifuse.

Speaking to an audience of financial analysts at a conference organized by investment bank Pacific Crest Securities Inc. in Vail, Colorado, on Tuesday (Aug. 8) Judy Bruner, SanDisk's chief financial officer, said there was no roadmap for when or how Matrix 3D memory would come to market, but that SanDisk would work on developing the technology in parallel with other options to increase the density of conventional NAND flash memory.

"So, between ourselves and M-Systems we have actually three, what I would call, pretty significant types of technology under development," said Bruner, speaking of SanDisk's planned acquisition of M-Systems Ltd. (Kfar Saba, Israel) for $1.35 billion, announced July 30.

"We would have 3-bits per cell, 4-bits per cell and three-dimensional memory which we acquired through our acquisition earlier this year of Matrix Semiconductor and which we are busy at work looking at how we evolve that 3D technology from a one-time-programmable to a read-writable type of memory," Bruner said.

"So we will work on all three of these technologies in parallel. We don't have a particular road-map, as of yet, as to which one might be the one that comes to market first, or second or third, or how they come to market, but all three of them, we believe, are important technology for us to continue to develop for the future," Bruner concluded.

One memory card from SanDisk, thought to be based on the one-time-programmble Matrix 3D memory, is the Rolling Stones Gruvi Card, part number SDSDQT-256, a pre-recorded memory card that contains the music album 'A Bigger Bang'. The Gruvi card format is intended to be inserted in mobile phones and personal digital assistants.