Is There Still a Future for Hard Disk Drives?


The capacity for solid state drives (SSDs) keeps going up while the price per terabyte keeps falling, sometimes raising questions about the future for hard disk drives (HDDs). Will the cost of SSDs per TB eventually become so low that they will totally displace HDDs? I decided to ask a couple of experts in the field, Jim Handy from Objective Analysis and Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates. ... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs The industry is still wondering if Intel will buy GlobalFoundries (GF). In the meantime, GF has announced a fab expansion plan in upstate New York. These plans include immediate investments at its existing Fab 8 facility as well as construction of a new fab on the same campus. That will double the capacity at the site. Intel has reported its second-quarter 2021 financial... » read more

Cloudy Outlook Seen For IC Biz


After a slowdown in the first half of 2019, chipmakers and equipment vendors face a cloudy outlook for the second half of this year, with a possible recovery in 2020. Generally, the semiconductor industry began to see a slowdown starting in mid- to late-2018, which extended into the first half of 2019. During the first half of this year, memory and non-memory vendors were negatively impacted... » read more

Challenges In Making And Testing STT-MRAM


Several chipmakers are ramping up a next-generation memory type called STT-MRAM, but there are still an assortment of manufacturing and test challenges for current and future devices. STT-MRAM, or spin-transfer torque MRAM, is attractive and gaining steam because it combines the attributes of several conventional memory types in a single device. In the works for years, STT-MRAM features the ... » read more

The Uncertain Future Of Hard Drives


The future of hard drives has been an iffy subject for nearly a decade. The most recent pressure has come from solid-state drives made from flash memory, which have transformed cell phones and tablets and other portable appliances. But the Internet has driven a staggering demand for data storage and the hard drive business has thrived. The question of what’s next for hard drives first appe... » read more