When a Shortage Looms
The Memory Guy has been getting calls lately asking how to tell that a shortage is developing. My answer is always the same: It’s hard to tell.
One indicator is that spot prices which were below contract prices rise above contract prices. This doesn’t happen for all components or densities of DRAM or NAND flash at the same time. Some of these transitions are temporary as well. It takes patience to see if it was a momentary change or if it was the onset of a shortage.
DRAM spot prices have generally been below contract prices since August 2014, but this month they raised above contract prices. NAND flash spot prices also fell below contract prices in mid-2014 but today NAND’s spot price remains lower than contract prices.
Lead times represent another indicator. If the lead time for a number of components increases then those chips are moving into a shortage. Lead times have recently been rising for both NAND flash and DRAM.
A third indication occurs when suppliers start to Continue reading
Samsung Power Glitch – Is It Important?
On Saturday, June 18, Samsung’s Xian fab, the only facility in the world currently producing 3D NAND flash, suffered a power failure. How much of a problem is this?
The answer really depends upon who you ask. An article in the Financial Express quoted Samsung as saying that it would have a minimal impact, and that full-scale operations should resume in a few days. The article also said that Samsung estimated that the wafer loss would be below 10,000 wafers.
Assuming that the entire loss consisted of Samsung’s most advanced 48-layer 256Gb 3D NAND a 10,000-wafer loss would be less than 1% of total industry gigabyte shipments.
Korea Times quoted an anonymous fund manager who said: “The one-time incident will cost Samsung up to 20 billion won, which is very minimal. It won’t make heavy impact on Samsung’s chip business and the entire industry.”
According to Korean news source Chosenilbo the outage was caused by Continue reading
Putting DRAM Prices in Perspective
For almost two years there has been a lot of worry about DRAM spot prices. This post’s graphic plots the lowest weekly spot price per gigabyte for the cheapest DRAM, regardless of density, on a semi-logarithmic scale. (Remember that on a semi-logarithmic scale constant growth appears as a straight line.)
The downward-sloping red line on right side of the chart shows that DRAM prices have been sliding at a 45% annual rate since October 2014. This has a lot of people worried for the health of the industry.
What most fail to remember, though, is that DRAM spot prices hit their lowest point twice in 2011, at $2.40 in August, and then $2.20 in November. Today’s lowest DRAM spot prices have only recently dipped below the $2.52 point hit in October of 2014.
The black dotted line in the chart is intended to focus readers’ attention on DRAM costs, which decrease at a 30% average Continue reading
XMC Breaks Ground for 3D NAND Fab
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
Toshiba Restructuring: New 3D Fab Coming
Beleaguered 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:
- Grow 3D NAND production capacity
- Speed up 3D NAND development
- Increase SSD development resources
This post’s graphic is an Continue reading
Goodbye, Andy Grove
It 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.
Is Micron Being Acquired?
The following is an excerpt of an Objective Analysis Alert sent to our clients 7/13/15.
A July 13 Wall Street Journal article disclosed that China’s state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup has bid to buy Micron Technology for $21 a share or $23 billion, which would make this the largest-ever Chinese takeover of a U.S. company.
Objective Analysis has been telling our clients for the past few years that either China or India would create a new DRAM/NAND manufacturing company, especially since memory chip makers have enjoyed a long period of profits, and this usually motivates outsiders to invest in new DRAM makers. We did not anticipate an acquisition.
Countries with heavy industry typically move into the semiconductor business during an extended upturn, and become DRAM suppliers since DRAM is an undifferentiated commodity. Commodities sell almost solely on price and success is based on little more than manufacturing strength. This is a business model that industrial economies understand.
In addition to Micron’s tangible assets, including Continue reading
DRAM Prices Down, But Not So Bad
For the past ten months DRAM prices have been undergoing a steady slide. Is the market in a crisis? Not really!
Today’s low spot price of $4.30/GB puts us on a par with February 2013, a full two years ago (see chart). DRAM makers have done a lot to reduce their production costs since that time, so their margins this quarter will be much better than they were in the first quarter of 2013.
But we are still a very long way from the bottom of the last market downturn. In late 2012 spot prices reached a low of $2.52/GB, a full 41% lower than today’s lowest spot prices.
The Memory Guy models the production costs of leading memory chips, and DRAM manufacturing costs have been decreasing for the past several years at an average annual rate of about 30%. That means that costs today are about half of what they were two years ago, and one third of their level this time in 2012.
So even though today’s Continue reading
Semiconductor Market Ends Year on a High Note
The Semiconductor Industry Association this week announced the year-end World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) revenues for 2014. Worldwide sales grew 9.9% to reach a record total of $335.8 billion, outperforming the WSTS fall forecast. Annual sales increased in all four regional markets for the first time since 2010. Memory was the fastest growing segment, increasing 18.2%, partly based on DRAM growth of 34.7%.It’s encouraging that all geographical areas experienced growth. This implies that the world economy is finally on the mend.
The industry’s 9.9% worldwide growth was a good bit lower than Objective Analysis’ December 2013 prediction of growth in excess of 20%. We admit that we overshot, expecting both higher bit growth and stronger pricing in DRAM and NAND flash than actually materialized.
The $335.8 billion number is really Continue reading
Cypress to Merge with Spansion
(Excerpted from an Objective Analysis Alert issued 1 December 2014.)
In a move touted as a merger of equals, Cypress will acquire Spansion in an all-stock transaction slated to close in the second quarter of 2015. The purchase price is estimated at $1.6 billion.
Cypress points out that it is the leading producer of SRAMs, and that Spansion is the leading NOR flash provider.
One striking feature of this transaction is the Continue reading
