Tag: Yokkaichi

Did Toshiba REALLY Lose 3-6 Weeks’ Production?

Toshiba's Fab 5 in YokkaichiYesterday The Memory Guy learned of an amazing article in DigiTimes about a 3-6 week shutdown at Toshiba’s Yokkaichi NAND flash fab line.  According to the story Toshiba’s production was shut down for 3-6 weeks accounting for a production loss of 100,000 wafers.  Another article in PC Games N converted that to lost bytes and came up with the number 400,000 terabytes.

Some quick math shows the errors in both of these articles.

First of all, the wafer stoppage.  The Toshiba/SanDisk Yokkaichi Joint Venture wafer fabrication complex processes a little over 2 million wafers per year.  Divide that by 52 weeks and you find that’s about 40,000 wafers per week, so 100,000 wafers would be 2.5 weeks’ output, not 3-6 weeks.

The number of bytes that PC Games N published takes a little more math.  According to TechInsights Toshiba’s 15nm 128Gb MLC chip has an area of 99mm².  That gets you a little over 10TB/wafer.  The company’s 48-layer TLC 256Gb part should produce about twice that.  Yet, if you divide PC Games’ Continue reading “Did Toshiba REALLY Lose 3-6 Weeks’ Production?”

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”

SanDisk & Toshiba to Add NAND Capacity

Toshiba-SanDisk Wafer Fabs in Yokkaichi JapanSanDisk today announced that its joint venture with Toshiba would begin construction in August of its Fab 5 “phase two” shell.  Completion of this Yokkaichi, Japan wafer fabrication facility is slated for mid-2014.

SanDisk expects to use this facility for technology transitions of existing Yokkaichi wafer capacity.  The new clean room will provide the space for the additional equipment necessary to transition existing wafer capacity to next-generation 2D NAND technologies and to early generations of 3D NAND technology.  In this way it will perform support for Fab 3, Fab 4 and phase one of Fab 5.

This is consistent with the JV’s use of Continue reading “SanDisk & Toshiba to Add NAND Capacity”

Toshiba to Cut NAND Production by 30%

Toshiba's Fab 5 in YokkaichiIn a surprise announcement Toshiba has said that it will immediately cut NAND flash production by approximately 30%.  The company explains that this is being done “to reduce inventory in the market and improve the overall balance between supply and demand.”  Toshiba’s release implies that this move is expected to improve prices, which have dropped as low as $0.31/GB recently.

By common measures of market share, which typically leave out SanDisk (for reasons too complex to discuss here) Toshiba holds a share of roughly 30% of the NAND flash market.  By cutting its output by 30% Toshiba would be reducing overall NAND supply by 10%.  If we were to include SanDisk, then that percentage would decrease to about 7.5%.  Either one of these is significantly more than Continue reading “Toshiba to Cut NAND Production by 30%”