Large Language Models (LLMs) demand immense amounts of memory, and the more people use them, the more memory is required. Memory makers responded by accelerating plans to build new memory fabs, with a focus on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and DRAM , the first of which is scheduled to start production in 2027. But the demand for memory may also provide an opportunity for new ideas to find footing. One of these is a tricked-out version of the kind of memory that lives in an SD card or a thumb drive —High Bandwidth Flash (HBF). It essentially takes the ideas that made HBM successful—stacking multiple chips to increase capacity and bandwidth—and applies them to the NAND flash memory commonly used for data storage in SD cards, thumb drives, and smartphones , among many other devices. “People ask, ‘How in the world does this make a grain of sense? Flash is enormously slow,’” says Jim Handy , general director at semiconductor market research firm Objective Analysis .…