The Week In Review: Oct. 11


By Mark LaPedus & Ed Sperling Demand is running high for DRAMs, thanks to last month’s fab fire at Hynix’ China plant. “The impact from Hynix' fab fire seems to be far more extensive than we had originally thought. We now think the factory is most likely up at the earliest by May/June 2014, which certainly provides robust pricing support for DRAM. Hynix is in the process of convertin... » read more

MRAM Begins To Attract Attention


By Mark LaPedus In the 1980s, there were two separate innovations that changed the landscape in a pair of related fields—nonvolatile memory and storage. In one effort, Toshiba invented the flash memory, thereby leading to NAND and NOR devices. On another front, physicists discovered the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect, a technology that forms the basis of hard disk drives, magnetores... » read more

Mobile Memory Madness


By Mark LaPedus The insatiable thirst for more bandwidth in smartphones, tablets and other devices has prompted an industry standards body to revamp its mobile memory interface roadmap. As part of the changes, the Joint Electron Devices Engineering Council (JEDEC) has scaled back the initial version of Wide I/O technology and pushed out the introduction date of a true 3D stacked architectur... » read more

What’s After NAND Flash?


By Mark LaPedus For years, many have predicted the end of flash memory scaling, particularly NAND, but the technology continues to defy the odds as it moves down the process curve. Still, there are signs that the floating gate structure in today’s flash memory is on its last legs. The floating gate is seeing an undesirable reduction in the control gate to capacitive coupling ratio. And ... » read more

New Entrants Seek Niches in NAND Flash Fray


By Mark LaPedus For some time, the NAND flash market has been primarily dominated by five vendors: Micron, Samsung, SanDisk, SK Hynix and Toshiba. Other vendors have been seeking to get a foothold in the exploding market — with little or no luck. Intel Corp. and Powerchip Semiconductor Corp. have separately experienced limited success in NAND. And Elpida Memory Inc. and Spansion Inc. are... » read more

New Low-Power Memory Interface Ahead


By Pallab Chatterjee The trend in consumer electronic devices is toward a multimedia-centric data flow, forcing changes in the memory interface needed to handle it. The increased compute resources needed for video signal processing, along with high-definition audio, used to be the exclusive domain of mainstream desktop computers and servers due to their access to memory and high data throug... » read more

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