SAN JOSE, Calif. -- At the recent Flash Memory Summit, there was a range of opinions on the state of the NAND industry, scaling, 3-bit-per-cell and SSDs. Here's some of the comments from the experts in the field:

General NAND market

Jim Handy, an analyst at Objective Analysis:

''The NAND market continues to be a tough battlefield, and the clear advantage falls to those with the most cost-effective technology. Manufacturers who have the lowest cost structure are in a position to profit at prices that would cause losses to their competition.''

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G. Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research:

Solid-state drives (SSDs) were supposed to drive NAND demand, ''but it hasn't happened. The cost-per-bit for flash is higher than disk drives. So, consumers aren't that dumb. People are not going to buy SSDs because it's flash.''

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Alan Niebel, CEO of WebFeet Research:

''Demand (for NAND) is better, but at what level? Overall consumer spending is not as buoyant as it was last year.''

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Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner Inc.:

''(NAND) supply constraints continue to plague the market and, despite expectations that it would soften briefly, the market appears poised for prices to remain firm in the coming months.

Nearly all device types, including the high-volume MLC parts, witnessed higher prices. Recent channel checks support the claims that NAND suppliers will continue to manage their business for profitability. With lean inventories among the NAND vendors and healthy inventories with major NAND customers, pricing will likely remain relatively stable well into the fourth quarter. Consumer demand during the holiday season continues to be the unknown variable, and while the 'sell-in' of chips to products for retail is encouraging, the question remains, 'Will consumers be buying?'