NAND flash is the hot memory technology "du jour". Its chips sit at the heart of digital cameras and many iPods.

But in the next decade it will be eclipsed by something new, says Eli Harari, an industry pioneer who invented Flash memory 20 years ago and chief executive of flash memory maker SanDisk.

Technological challenges making NAND chips below the 20-nanometer circuit width that manufacturing plants are expected to employ not that many years from now are the reasons why.

"We're not done yet," Harari said Wednesday at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara. "But in the past three years, the cost reductions manufacturers achieved with new production technologies have fallen behind the price reductions Nand chips have seen in the market".

And in the future, NAND scaling – where new manufacturing techniques lead to performance improvements – will slow down. At the end of the day, every technology comes to an end, Harari said.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

Here's also short video of Eli Harari receiving the cake celebrating Flash memory's 20th Birthday: