Micron energizer — Chief steering chipmaker into a new era

BOISE — Just as he completed a low-level aerobatic loop above the Idaho desert, Steve Appleton's single-engine stunt plane stalled 25 feet off the ground while traveling 160 mph.

In the second before the aircraft plowed into the sagebrush, Appleton stomped the left rudder pedal, slightly raising the right wing and elevating the nose.

"That's about all you can do, because the fact of the matter is you're going to hit," Appleton told The Associated Press recently in his first interview about the July 2004 crash, which left him with a gash across his head. "I got it in a slightly better profile for impact and obviously I lived."

Appleton, 45, uses that same detached risk analysis in his day job: chairman, president and CEO of Micron Technology Inc., the biggest maker of computer memory chips in the United States.

Slowing growth of personal computer sales combined with a worldwide oversupply of Micron's mainstay product, dynamic random access memory or DRAM chips, add up to free-falling prices that threaten the company's future.

In seven of its past nine years, Micron has seen the per megabit average selling price for its digital memory products drop, including a 24 percent decline in 2005. Many times, the glut of semiconductors on the market means Micron is selling chips for less than it costs to make them at its plants in Boise — where the 10,000 employees make Micron Idaho's largest private employer — and worldwide.

To smooth the financial turbulence, Appleton has steered Micron into non-PC memory products, including new image sensor chips that are used in cell-phone cameras, medical pill cams and on-board video systems for cars and trucks.

And now he's betting his company's future on advances in the solid-state memory known as NAND flash. Used today to store photos in digital cameras and songs on the iPod Nano, Appleton believes NAND — a logic function used in computers, the name formed by combining the operators Not and AND — will eventually overtake mechanical hard drives as the preferred way to store data in mobile computers.

"Because there are no moving parts, it won't crash," Appleton said. "And with NAND in notebooks, you'll have instant on, no more of that ridiculous boot-up process."

Patience has never been part of Appleton's resume. The son of a doughnut cutter and a school teacher, he was raised on the sketchy side of Los Angeles and won a tennis scholarship to Boise State University.