In its monthly press release today, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced that the semiconductor market had already hit the amazing $1 trillion mark for 2026 even before the end of the third quarter. SIA announced that August semiconductor sales, as compiled by WSTS, hit $159.7 billion, an increase of 144.3% over August 2025’s $65.4 billion.
For some years the industry has been Continue reading “Semis Hit $1 Trillion in Under 3 Quarters!”
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?”
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”
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”
On April 2nd SNIA hosted a CXL webinar to discuss where the technology currently is, and where it is headed. The Memory Guy was honored to play a part in this event.
Other speakers were Arthur Sainio, on behalf of SNIA, Mahesh Natu, on behalf of the CXL Consortium, and Torry Steed of SMART Modular, a company that has been one of the earliest providers of Continue reading “SNIA CXL Webinar Available On-Demand”
High-end xPUs (GPUs, TPUs, and other AI processors) use HBM memories to get the absolute highest memory bandwidth for training the Large Language Models (LLMs) used in today’s generative AI systems. These processors, used in the thousands by hyperscale datacenters, can consume a kilowatt each. As a result, they must dissipate a phenomenal quantity of heat. This has become a very challenging problem for these datacenters. (The Memory Guy should mention here that Objective Analysis plans soon to release a report on HBM.)
The problem has attracted the attention of Continue reading “AI xPUs to be Cooled by HBM”
