hynix

Power outage at Hynix's fab. Now all eyes on chip prices

A lot of original equipment manufacturers are holding their collective breath right now. Hynix Semiconductor's fab in Wuxi, China, suffered an outage lasting more than 15 hours on Monday and that's inevitably raised questions about the potential impact on DRAM prices. Here's the short story: The company estimates it will take a couple of days to return to full production at the plant, which makes about half of Hynix's total DRAM output. And what about chip prices? Still to be determined, but this market has been awash in inventory for quite awhile.

Oddly enough, prices for … Read more

Rambus wins latest legal round, beats back fraud claims

The latest round in everyone's favorite ongoing legal saga, Rambus versus the world, has tipped in Rambus' favor.

A jury ruled Wednesday in San Francisco that Rambus did not obtain patents for memory technology through fraud or anti-competitive means, in a blow to memory makers Hynix, Micron, and Nanya. Rambus has spent years trying to enforce its patents on memory used in just about every PC and server in the world, while fighting off claims that it obtained those patents through shady means.

At one point in the mid-1990s, Rambus and the memory industry sat down to work on … Read more

Hynix chooses dense Z-RAM tech for future memory

Hynix is shaking things up in the memory market with its decision to license Innovative Silicon's Z-RAM technology.

The two companies jointly announced the agreement on Monday.

Z-RAM is a twist on the traditional makeup of a memory cell. Almost all PCs use DRAM to temporarily store information while the system is running, to avoid delays accessing that data from the hard drive every time it is needed. And each DRAM cell needs a transistor and a capacitor, which stores electrical charge, to represent a bit of data. But Innovative Silicon figured out a way to take advantage of … Read more