Flash memory is enjoying a huge growth spurt worldwide, as demand booms for all kinds of digital, media-centric devices, including PDAs, cameras, music players, and mobile handsets. The upsurge is creating huge opportunities and threatening to upend the roster of suppliers. Almost since the day it first publicly entered the flash-memory business in 1988, Intel has been the market-share bellwether, even though Toshiba had unveiled its first flash-memory device four years earlier. Intel dominated the segment for a decade, then held a slim market-share lead all the way up until 2002. As of last year, however, Intel finds itself in fourth place behind Toshiba, Samsung, and Spansion (the combined operations of AMD arid Fujitsu) (see the table).
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