NAND

Intel will target solid-state drives for server computers in a tie up with Hitachi that was announced Monday night.

Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) said they will "jointly develop and deliver" Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel (FC) solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers, workstations, and storage systems.

While Hitachi is a large supplier of hard disk drives, Intel manufactures and sells consumer and enterprise-class solid-state drives (and the flash memory chips inside the drives). The enterprise-class X25-E Extreme SSDs that Intel offers now are based on Serial ATA (SATA) technology. As are its consumer-class … Read more

Micron Technology will bring out a 256GB solid-state drive early next year while it moves, along with Intel, to a new manufacturing process.

A Micron representative said Monday that the company will start volume production of a 256GB solid-state drive for consumer use in March 2009.

This follows Samsung's announcement last week that it had begun mass-producing 256GB solid-state drives.

The Micron RealSSD C200 will read data at 250MBps (megabytes per second) and write at 100MBps. It is sampling to customers now. Samsung, by comparison, is claiming sequential read rates of 220MBps, with sequential write rates of 200MBps.

The … Read more

Samsung on Wednesday night said it has begun mass-producing 256GB solid-state drives. This size tops the largest-capacity SSDs found in laptops today.

Samsung currently offers 64GB and 128GB SSDs for laptops.

The new 256GB drives are faster too, the company claims, more than doubling the performance rate of Samsung 64GB and 128GB SSDs.

The drives combine sequential read rates of 220 megabytes per second, with sequential write rates of 200MBps. "This sharply narrows the performance gap between read and write operations to only 10 percent, compared to a read-write speed difference of between 20 (percent) and 70 percent for … Read more

With all the buzz about solid-state drives that Intel, Super Talent Technology, and other companies have been making, I am a little surprised to learn that the NAND flash-memory market--once one of the fastest-growing segments of the global semiconductor industry--is actually facing a historic downturn.

According to a forecast released on Friday by iSuppi, a technology research and advisory-services provider, the NAND-type flash-memory market has been stricken by weakening consumer spending, causing revenue to decline in 2008. Revenue is expected to decline in 2009, also.

In 2007, total worldwide revenue of the market was $13.9 billion; in 2008, this … Read more

After cutting executive pay last week, Micron Technology is now paring staff as it scales back flash memory chip production.

On the heels of reporting a $344 million fourth-quarter loss last week--when Micron said it was cutting executive pay 20 percent--the Boise, Idaho-based memory chip maker said Thursday that it was restructuring its memory operations.

Micron will reduce its global workforce by approximately 15 percent during the next two years. Most of the workforce cuts will occur in Boise.

"The combination of declining customer demand and product oversupply in the marketplace has driven selling prices for NAND flash … Read more

Micron's earnings pain will pass directly to executives. Micron Technology attributed a $344 million loss in the fourth quarter to a cratering memory market and said it would slash executives salaries as a result.

This was Micron's seventh straight quarterly loss. The largest memory chip manufacturer in the U.S. reported a net loss for the entire 2008 fiscal year of $1.6 billion, or $2.10 per diluted share on net sales of $5.8 billion.

Executives will feel the pain. "We are implementing a 20 percent reduction in salary compensation for Micron senior executives," … Read more

Samsung Electronics is looking into snapping up SanDisk, according to a late-Thursday post on PaidContent.

The South Korean consumer electronics maker confirmed that it is exploring "various opportunities" with SanDisk, but it noted that no decisions have been made, according to PaidContent, which cited an online Korean report.

Samsung reportedly is taking a look at SanDisk as a means to reduce its NAND flash memory costs, given that it pays the chipmaker roughly $354 million in annual licensing fees, according to the report. SanDisk is a strong player in the market for NAND flash memory, which is found … Read more

SanDisk sees flash memory maxing out during the next decade and believes 3D technology is the answer.

Flash memory disk supplier SanDisk said this week that it is looking beyond flash memory because of anticipated limitations. SanDisk intends to tap into 3D read-write memory technology it acquired with the purchase of Matrix Semiconductor back in 2005.

3D memory chips can store more data vertically, allowing greater densities. While conventional integrated circuits put all active circuitry on the silicon substrate, SanDisk's 3D architecture deposits multiple layers of active memory elements so that circuitry extends vertically as well.

Speaking at this week's second-quarter earnings conference call, Sanjay Mehrotra, SanDisk president and chief operating officer, said his company is "developing the 3D read/write memory that we believe will replace NAND flash sometime in the next decade when it can no longer be economically scaled."

This follows a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure earlier in the quarter covering an agreement that SanDisk signed with Toshiba to collaborate on the development of rewriteable 3D memory. SanDisk and Toshiba "will jointly perform research and development" on 3D memory, the companies said in the disclosure.

SanDisk has made progress with the technology since it acquired Matrix, according to Chairman and CEO Eli Harari, speaking earlier this week duing the earnings conference call. "SanDisk has been making good, steady progress since our acquisition three years ago of Matrix Semiconductor...We currently have more than 200 issued patents that cover key elements of 3D rewritable memory technology," Harari said.

Based on these statements and its collaboration with Toshiba, SanDisk believes 3D memory, though challenging, is a viable successor to flash. Commercialization presents "significant challenges" but the "effort is worth the prize as 3D memory is a potential game changer," Harari said. The technology would "achieve the cost structure to disrupt hard disk drive in the coming decade," he said.… Read more

Intel CEO Paul Otellini had mostly upbeat news on Tuesday when the world's largest chipmaker reported solid earnings, but Atom processor issues and weakness in the flash memory business were recurring themes in the earnings conference call.

One of the most interesting comments made during the conference call on Tuesday by Otellini was about the Atom processor. "(Atom) is less than a third the performance of our Centrino (processor). You're dealing with something that most of us wouldn't use," he said.

Though he qualified this by repeating the mantra that Atom is "principally designed … Read more