Scale economies are an essential component to the success of a memory manufacturer, yet The Memory Guy finds that very few executives in the industry truly understand them. This mechanism may be the single most important issue in introducing a new memory technology to the market.
In this post I will Continue reading “Understanding the Economies of Scale”
The Memory Guy was recently contacted by a researcher at imec, the Belgian research consortium, about the rebirth of an old idea. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s semiconductor makers had considered using charge-coupled devices (CCDs) for computer main memories. Probably few readers will even recognize either the name or the abbreviation. The CCD memory was a good idea that was completely overshadowed by another good idea — DRAM — that ended up taking the Continue reading “Are CCD Memories Coming Back?”
DDR DRAM has now been with us for a quarter century, and it has provided a lot of bandwidth. But this standard has become increasingly challenging to scale, and it has already proven to fall short of the demands of the modern AI datacenter.
What’s to become of Continue reading “Revolutionary New DDR Standards Expected”
For the past few months memory prices have been skyrocketing. This has been fueled by an interesting combination of extraordinary AI spending and HBM’s low gigabyte production per DRAM wafer. Given these facts, which I will explain in detail in this post, just how high will memory prices go? And, after that, how long will prices stay this high? The Memory Guy has been getting asked that Continue reading “How High Can Memory Prices Go?”
I recently received a request for comment on an article in Tom’s Hardware titled Samsung touts 96% lower-power NAND design – researchers investigate design based on ferroelectric transistors. It sounded pretty compelling, so I did a little investigating.
The Tom’s Hardware piece was based on a Nov 26 Nature article titled Continue reading “Is a 96% Lower-Power NAND Coming?”
At some point you’ve probably felt the way that SK hynix’ executives must feel today: that there’s something so wonderfully exciting that you absolutely must share it with everyone right away.
It appears to have been in this spirit that the company issued the press release for its fourth quarter earnings a full seventeen Continue reading “SK hynix’ Earnings Too Good to Keep Quiet”
On November 17th, at 11:00 AM Pacific, Jim Handy and Tom Coughlin will share information from the upcoming annual update of their new memory report, now in its eleventh year.
Click HERE to learn more and register.
An associate recently directed The Memory Guy to a short but interesting article published last March in Korea’s Chosen Daily called: Micron’s cautious EUV strategy raises questions on future DRAM edge. As the headline promises, the article questions Micron’s decision to postpone using EUV to make DRAM until its 1-gamma process node, which is now in mass production.
It’s particularly interesting to Continue reading “When Should DRAM Makers Adopt EUV?”
DDR4 spot prices have been surging since March. Why is that happening, and what can we understand from it? The Memory Guy thought it might be helpful to chart what has happened with DDR4 and DDR5 spot prices to better understand that.
The chart below plots the lowest spot prices of tested DDR4 and DDR5 DRAMs of any Continue reading “Some Clarity on 2025’s DDR4 Price Surge”
Fifty seven years ago today, the US Patent Office granted a patent for a new memory technology to IBM. This approach used a single transistor and a single capacitor as an alternative to SRAM which is built with a six-transistor cell. This Memory Guy blog post was written to commemorate that milestone.
Since the goal of a semiconductor is to squeeze as many functions as possible onto a single silicon chip, the new Continue reading “Remembering Bob Dennard, the Father of DRAM”
