nand

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

It's been a long haul for phase change memory, but the goal is in sight.

Numonyx, the memory joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel, is already shipping samples of phase change memory (PCM) chips to customers and will start shipping PCM chips commercially later this year, CEO Brian Harrison said at a press conference Monday.

"We expect to bring it to market this year and generate some revenue," Harrison said. "It is one to two years before it becomes widely commercially available."

Hearing a CEO talk about existing samples and near-term commercial shipments is a … Read more

The hard drive will not die. Let's get this on the record now, at the beginning of 2008, because readers may see a fair number of stories proclaiming its demise. Though Friday's Intel-Micron high-speed flash memory announcement points to increasing use of solid state drives (SSDs) in digital products, flash is chasing prey that has eluded imminent death for years. SSDs are gaining acceptance selectively not broadly. SSDs in standard notebooks? No. And even if you're, for instance, a PC vendor trying to compete in the ultra-thin notebook market, chances are you will still opt in most … Read more

Solid-state drives are still going to be somewhat hard to find and expensive in 2008, but mass production, cheaper flash, and tech advances will start to change that in 2009 and 2010.

Micron Technology, the Boise, Idaho-based maker of DRAM and flash memory, this week unveiled plans to come out with solid-state drives. The drives function like regular hard drives. But instead of storing data on spinning disks, solid-state drives store it on NAND memory chips--the kind found in cameras and MP3 players.

Micron will start mass-producing solid-state drives in the first quarter of 2008. The first drives will hold … Read more

No, that's not a typo.

The current reigning king of flash memory pushes the envelope for NAND flash a little further with a 64Gb (gigabit) memory chip. Put 16 of them together and it amounts to 128GB (gigabytes), which is enough to put some hard drives to shame. Samsung claims the mega-memory card is capable of storing 32,000 MP3 files.

It's built with a new manufacturing process that Samsung dubs the self-aligned double patterning technology (SaDPT), which must be pretty heavy stuff because the company has applied for 30 patents in connection with the new 64Gb flash … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Flash memory will take over the world, if the laws of physics don't get it first, according to one of the technology's biggest backers.

On one hand, NAND flash--the kind of flash found inside digital cameras and MP3 players--is crushing the competition, Eli Harari, CEO of SanDisk, said on Wednesday at the Flash Memory Summit here.

NAND has made 1-inch hard drives obsolete. Then it's on to 1.8-inch hard drives and possibly larger 2.5-inch notebook hard drives, Harari said.

"The next big market will be video. You should expect next … Read more