Headlines from this year's CES included Microsoft's Bill Gates, Intel's Craig Barrett, Hewlett Packard's Carly Fiorina and Texas Instrument's Rich Templeton - non-traditional CE players but bigwigs from markets like software, semiconductors, PCs and DSPs, Kang said.

"If you look at the show today, it's either display or mobile, portable stuff. And the enabler for the portability for consumer devices is low-cost, high-density memory. Samsung has been touting that for four years," he told Electronic News in a one-on-one interview.

"When Samsung was a major DRAM vendor, it was one-dimensional: DRAM equals PC. You see today that both keynote speakers [Gates and Barrett] are PC guys, which is kind of surprising. Why don't they get a consumer guy? Sony, a Samsung guy; why get an IT guy to speak?"

Samsung, a memory player and established CE brand, has been successful in riding the memory wave from DRAM for PCs to other options like flash in today's hottest portables.

"We see the migration from PC-based to mobile-based as a driver for memory. The perfect example is the handheld phone where there are people saying that the mobile phone will be the center [of digital living], not the PC or the multimedia center."

Handheld phones are especially appealing to memory vendors, as they require various types of memory, including NOR flash, NAND flash and SRAM.

"That revolution of going from a PC-based to a mobile consumer-based [devices] is right in line with memory. That, to me, is a confirmation of what we have been doing in the last four or five years."

Samsung said it is in the process of applying for a 2006 CES keynote now. "We'll see, maybe next year," Kang concluded.

By: DocMemory
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