On May 21 a government agency in China issued a ruling to prevent Micron Technology products from being used in systems that handle critical information. This is the outcome of an investigation that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) opened in March, accusing the company of cybersecurity crimes.
This Memory Guy blog post examines the impact of Continue reading “Micron Closed Out of Some China Markets”
Infineon recently introduced a NOR flash chip with an LPDDR interface. Some clients have asked The Memory Guy: “Why would Infineon have done that?”
After all, LPDDR is mostly used in cell phones, and these boot from the enormous NAND flash that’s already in the phone. A byte of NAND is a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper than a byte of NOR, so a cell phone’s not going to use this part.
Infineon tells us that their target market is Continue reading “Infineon Introduces NOR with an LPDDR Interface”
The Memory Guy recently had a rare opportunity of a private fab tour at the Monolithastery, a memory fab in Saint Gobain Pont-à-Mousson, France. This facility combines a very traditional monastery with a semiconductor wafer fabrication plant. It’s the only such Continue reading “Visit to a Monolithastery”
Today Gordon Moore, a figurehead in the semiconductor industry, passed away at 94 years of age. He will be sorely missed by the semiconductor industry.
Moore, the namesake of Moore’s Law, cofounded both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation. He was an unassuming genius and visionary who, as a part of Intel’s leadership triumvirate in the company’s main growth phase, provided Continue reading “In Memoriam: Gordon Moore”
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) recently released its January semiconductor market revenue figures. January revenues were down 5.2% month-on-month, and 18.5% from January 2022. Things are pretty bad.
The Memory Guy decided to compare the current situation to the forecast that I was sharing with my clients last October, five months ago. At that time my company predicted that 2022 revenues would Continue reading “Semiconductor Collapse Runs Slightly Behind Schedule”
Contributor Ron Neale returns to The Memory Guy blog with a deeper analysis of the University of Lancaster’s ULTRARAM, which was first announced relatively recently, in early 2020. This post includes his revealing interchange with the university’s Professor Manus Hayne, a key member of the ULTRARAM program, in which the professor indicates that GaAs ICs and Chiplets might be the way ahead for this technology.
Ron tells me that this is the first mention that he is aware of for Continue reading “A Very Revealing ULTRARAM Update”
[Post updated 14 Feb. with Kioxia data, a margin chart, and to correct an error.]
The quarterly results of most memory companies have been reported, and revenues, gigabyte shipments, and prices are all down. Most of the profits have been taken out of the business.
This is not an unusual situation for Continue reading “Memory Market Down, but a Turnaround is Coming”
In this post in The Memory Guy blog, the first of a 2-part series, Ron Neale returns to explore the present state-of-play for chalcogenide-based switching and memory, with a plea for continuation of research. Along the way he invokes a three-point law for determining the probability of success for would be emerging memory entrepreneurs.
Does PCM still have a chance to become an important new memory technology? Intel’s abandonment of their Optane memory project, while sad, after so much effort and expense, does not and should not Continue reading “The Future of Chalcogenide Switching”
Although The Memory Guy blog doesn’t often discuss the total semiconductor market, Objective Analysis does a particularly good job of forecasting not only memories, but also the semiconductor market as a whole.
That said, a video explaining our 2023 semiconductor forecast has recently Continue reading “Objective Analysis Forecast Update”
Before there was DRAM (1969, Bob Dennard) or SRAM (1963, Robert H. Norman) there was another little-known random-access memory from computer maker NCR that was known as CRAM. The Memory Guy only recently learned of this technology thanks to a relative’s visit to the NCR Collection in the Dayton History Museum in Dayton, Ohio.
CRAM, a magnetic technology, was a vital part of the Continue reading “Introducing a RAM You Never Heard of – CRAM!”
