February, 2012 - The Memory Guy Blog

New NAND Player: Macronix

Macronix, a company known for its leadership in mask ROMs and low-density NOR flash has just entered the NAND flash market. This adds a new player to a very small pool of competitors: Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk, Hynix, Intel, and Micron.

The company’s first NAND products are SLC chips of two densities: 512Mb and 1Gb. Compare this to the offerings of the market’s other participants which range up to 256Gb. Spot price tracker InSpectrum doesn’t even track pricing of densities below 4Gb!

There still seems to be a good market for these low-density parts: According to WSTS Continue reading “New NAND Player: Macronix”

Rambus Acquires Unity Semiconductor

Rambus announced that the company has acquired privately-held Unity Semiconductor, an alternative memory technology company for $35 million. Unity employees have joined Rambus and will continue to develop next-generation nonvolatile memory.

Unity has an interesting technology that has caught the eye of some leading memory firms, including Micron, who had an exclusive right to Unity’s technology. The company’s CMOx is based on oxygen ions moving within a semiconducting material. It’s one species of resistive RAM.

Although Unity has been trying for years to manufacture very high density nonvolatile memory chips, The Memory Guy is not aware that the company has yet produced the chips they have set out to make.

Continue reading “Rambus Acquires Unity Semiconductor”

Micron CEO Killed in Plane Crash

Today Micron CEO Steve Appleton was killed in an airplane accident. Objective Analysis has issued an alert to our clients and subscribers giving details of the wreck, Appleton’s contributions to the company, and some thoughts on the company’s succession. The Alert can be viewed by visiting the Objective Analysis Reports page.

Most of all my thoughts and sympathies go to Appleton’s family and his former co-workers, all of whom are mourning his death. Although we realize that Mr. Appleton will be missed, but we know that Micron will continue to follow the path set up by Appleton’s predecessor, Micron founder Jerry Parkinson, to maintain its position as one of the leading memory chip suppliers.