The Micron earnings call today (25 September, 2025) highlighted the company’s continuing strength in the memory business, and Micron’s management shared expectations for the market to remain strong through the end of calendar 2025. In this post The Memory Guy will share a bit of the information that Objective Analysis typically reserves for its paying clientele.
In brief, Micron’s end markets are Continue reading “Micron’s Earnings Reveal Continuing Market Strength”
(The following is an update of a post that originally ran on 22 November 2013. It was republished in 2024 as a part of a series to honor the 3D NAND inventors who have received the 2024 FMS Lifetime Achievement Award.)
A prior post in this series (3D NAND: Making a Vertical String) discussed the difficulties of Continue reading “3D NAND: Benefits of Charge Traps over Floating Gates”
The memory business is currently faring pretty well. DRAM spot prices have been relatively stable for more than a year, and NAND flash spot prices, although down 20% from their spring peak, are still 2½ times their mid-2023 trough.
The business is definitely off-trend, though, and that means that Continue reading “How Long Will Memory Growth Continue?”
All of a sudden HBM is the leading topic of conversation. Why is that? A good number of people ask the Memory Guy that question.
Sure, the recent explosion of generative AI has been the key part of that interest, but there was even more that encouraged competition into this market at an accelerated pace. The simple answer is that HBM, a DRAM used in AI applications, remained Continue reading “Why is Everyone Jumping Into the HBM Market?”
(The following is an update of a post that originally ran on 8 November 2013. It was republished in 2024 as a part of a series to honor the 3D NAND inventors who have received the 2024 FMS Lifetime Achievement Award.)
One of the thornier problems Continue reading “3D NAND: How do You Access the Control Gates?”
Samsung has just announced a QLC version of the 3D NAND that the company has calls its 9th-generation V-NAND. This follows the April announcement that its TLC version of the 280-layer 9th-generation device was in volume production.
Naming the product a “Memory Solution for AI Era”, Samsung tells us that Continue reading “Samsung’s New 280-Layer QLC NAND”
(The following is an update of a post that originally ran on 8 November 2013. It was republished in 2024 as a part of a series to honor the 3D NAND inventors who have received the 2024 FMS Lifetime Achievement Award.)
My prior 3D NAND post explained how Toshiba’s BiCS cell works, using a silicon nitride charge trap to substitute for a floating gate. This post will look at an alternative Continue reading “An Alternative Kind of Vertical 3D NAND String”
Something that The Memory Guy tries to do is to find other industries that travel down the same path as memory chips, or, better yet, industries that have already traveled down that path and can share the difficulties they have encountered along the way. Perhaps we can learn something from other industries that will make our own job a little easier. Maybe we can avoid certain difficulties that have afflicted those other industries, simply by knowing in advance that we are Continue reading “How the Tragedy of the Commons Impacts Memory”
(The following is an update of a post that originally ran on 1 November 2013. It was republished in 2024 as a part of a series to honor the 3D NAND inventors who have received the 2024 FMS Lifetime Achievement Award.)
Let’s look at how one form of 3D NAND is manufactured. For this post we will explore Continue reading “3D NAND: Making a Vertical String”
Every so often an investor will ask The Memory Guy: “Why does MRAM only sell into niche markets?”
These questions aren’t only about MRAM — some ask about ReRAM, FRAM, or PCM as well. It’s the same question for all of them. The answer is pretty simple: They’re expensive. All of these technologies command prices per gigabyte that are Continue reading “Why Do Emerging Memories Only Sell into Niches?”
