Month: March 2016

XMC Breaks Ground for 3D NAND Fab

2015 XMC campus

China foundry XMC has broken ground for its new 3D NAND flash fab, the country’s first China-owned 3D NAND flash facility.  Plans for this fab were publicly disclosed over a year ago.  Simon Yang, XMC’s CEO, gave a presentation at SEMI’s Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) on January 11, 2015 in which he detailed the need for China to produce a larger proportion of its overall chips, explaining how his company would help make that happen.

Yang used the map in this post’s graphic to show that XMC has enough land on its campus for six 300mm wafer fabs.  Two shells (yellow), each capable of processing 30,000 wafers per month, had been constructed by that time: Fab A (left) was already fully utilized, and Fab B (right) was ready for tooling.  The gray boxes show that the site has enough space to build 2 additional 2-line megafabs, each with a capacity of up to 100k wafers per month.  Accoding to DRAMeXchange XMC currently produces 20,000 wafers of NOR flash per month.  A March 30 China Daily article reports that monthly wafer production will reach 300,000 in 2020 and 1 million in 2030.

XMC’s formal name is Wuhan Xinxin Semiconductor Manufacturing, and it is located Continue reading “XMC Breaks Ground for 3D NAND Fab”

Toshiba Restructuring: New 3D Fab Coming

Toshiba Yokkaichi Fab ComplexBeleaguered Toshiba finally unveiled its restructuring plan on Friday.  The plan aims to return the company to profitability and growth through management accountability.

A lot of the presentation focused on the memory business, a shining star of the Toshiba conglomerate, which has so far included appliances, nuclear power plants, and medical electronics.

Toshiba has big plans for its Semiconductor & Storage Products Company, calling it “A pillar of income with Memories as a core business”.  The company plans to enhance its NAND flash cost competitiveness by accelerating development of BiCS (Toshiba’s 3D NAND technology) and by expanding its SSD business.   There are three parts to this effort:

  1. Grow 3D NAND production capacity
  2. Speed up 3D NAND development
  3. Increase SSD development resources

This post’s graphic is an Continue reading “Toshiba Restructuring: New 3D Fab Coming”

Goodbye, Andy Grove

Andy Grove - Only the Paranoid SurviveIt was sad to hear today of the passing of Andy Grove, Intel co-founder and former president.

Although I did not know him well, Andy was a part of my brief 1½-year stint at Intel in the early 1980s.  He played a key role in my “IOPEC” new employee training, and he and I were in cubicles on the same floor of the same Intel office building, so we would run into each other from time to time during the business day.

Plenty has been said about this man’s competence as a manager, and plenty more will be said.  He drove the creation of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturer.

I think I was most impressed, though, when he agreed to be interviewed for a PBS television special on the history of the semiconductor industry: “Silicon Valley: American Experience” despite the fact that his battle with Parkinson’s Disease had already rendered it difficult for him to speak.

I always meant to write to him to tell him how impressed I was that he would do that.  I guess I won’t have the chance now.

Early Computer Memories

Ryszard Milewicz' photo of Core MemoryMy colleague Lane Mason found an interesting history of memories blog post that answers the question: ” What did early computers use for fast read/write storage?”

The post in the Hackaday blog, written by Al Williams, covers drum memories, the Williams Tube and its competitor the Selectron (both briefly discussed in my earlier 3D XPoint post), mercury delay lines, dekatrons, core memory (the original Storage Class Memory), plated wire memory, twistor memory, thin-film memory, and bubble memory.

It also links to interesting videos about these devices.

Think of this as a companion piece to the EE Times memory history slideshow I covered in an earlier post.  It’s a fun and educational read!