Tag: memory

China edges into DRAM market

Posted on March 16, 2015 by - News

chinaflagThe major players in the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) market continue to be South Korean and Taiwanese companies, with only one US company, Micron competing in the marketplace.

But it looks like that’s set to change because a consortium of Chinese vendors bought Silicon Solution, a fabless firm quoted on Nasdaq.

Memory watch analysts DRAM Exchange said the consortium of high end investors was backed by the Chinese government. The government has pledged to invest 120 billion yuan in the semiconductor industry and this move shows just how seriously China takes the aim.

Right now, said the analysts, China’s imports of semiconductors – be they CPUs, DRAM and Flash memory exceed its petrol imports.

Intel is in bed with some Chinese semiconductor companies, and that, in itself is a significant factor.

China spent over $10 billion in importing DRAM last year – that’s 20 percent of the worldwide production of the semiconductors. Of that imported memory, 55 percent was for mobile memory, while PCs represented 19 percent and server memory eleven percent.

So it’s logical that to reduce this trade gap, China continues to invest in DRAM to give it a degree of self sufficiency.

How that will pan out for the competition remains to be seen.

 

DRAM market shows unseasonal growth

Posted on February 10, 2015 by - News

nand-chipsSales of DRAM rose by 8.2 percent in the fourth quarter, bucking the usual pattern in the memory market.
DRAM Exchange, which tracks the memory market said manufacturers of devices migrated fast to 20 and 25 nanometre production, and the additional output meant quarterly revenues worldwide amounted to $13 billion.
The firm said that Samsung has shown the most profit from making DRAM, with typical operating margins of 47 percent.
SK Hynix also makes healthy margins of 42  percent, while American DRAM maker Micron managed to turn in margins of 29.5 percent.
Although Micron is still manufacturing using 30 nanometre technology, it raised production of DRAM for servers, which is the most lucrative application.
Samsung started volume production on 20 nanometre in the fourth quarter and the yield rate and output of chips made at 25 nanometre has increased.
Micron has begun sampling on the 20 nanometre process but plans to migrate so fast that there will be 80,000 wafer starts a month by the end of this year.

 

Samsung begins production of 8Gb LPDDR4 memory

Posted on December 24, 2014 by - News

samsung-hqSamsung has begun volume production of its 8Gb LPDDR4 memory chips, with expected commercial shipments in 2015.

Moving to a new memory standard should significantly reduce the memory subsystem’s power consumption and will provide significant boosts to clock-speed.

Samsung claiming that its LPDDR4 can hit 3.2GHz, if the wind is behind it and it is going downhill. Meanwhile the mobile bus widths are significantly smaller than the 64-bit channels used by desktops and the higher clock speed per chip will help close the gap between the two.

Vendors are claiming that LPDDR4 clock speeds will outpace DDR4 thanks to its higher amount of total bandwidth potentially delivered to tablets and smartphones. Meanwhile, the power savings are expected to be substantial.

While there is no serious risk of a desktop or laptop DDR4 system being outperformed by a tablet or smartphone there is some indication that the gap might be closing a little.

So far no manufacturers have announced plans to adopt LPDDR4 in specific products, but once Samsung is shipping in volume it is going to happen quickly. Hot Hardware is predicting that the Galaxy S6 would be a good first candidate.

NAND flash prices to fall

Posted on December 16, 2014 by - News

memoryfutureThe price of NAND flash is flat or showing a slight fall, and prices are expected to drop significantly in 2015.

Trendforce reported that manufacturers are overstocked and that means prices will stay flat until the end of this year.

But prices are expeted to drop because sales of PCs, smartphones and tablets will fall by 10 percent in the first quarter.

These price drops will apply to the contract market rather than the spot market – the contract market is largely made up of manufacturers who commit themselves to volume amounts rather than scrabble around in the spot market.

And that means that in order to cut costs and reduce losses, the buyers of contract NAND will adopt more conservative buying strategies.

That, in turn, will mean the US and Asian manufacturers of NAND flash will keep prices down or even reduce them in the first quarter of next year.

Team builds high rise semiconductor

Posted on December 15, 2014 by - News

The image depicts today's single-story electronic circuit cards, where logic and memory chips exist as separate structures, connected by wires. Like city streets, those wires can get jammed with digital traffic going back and forth between logic and memory. On the right, Stanford engineers envision building layers of logic and memory to create skyscraper chips. Data would move up and down on nanoscale "elevators" to avoid traffic jams.Researchers from Stanford said they have successfully demonstrated the ability to build semiconductors that combine logic and memory chips in a “high rise” configuration.

The engineers said they have created a new technology to produce transistors, a new type of memory that is ideal for multiple levels and a different way of building the high rise structures.

Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford professor, claimed the design and fabrication techniques are scalable.  “With further  development this architecture could lead to computing performance that is much, much grater than anything available today,” h said.

Heat generated by silicon chips has been a problem for decades and leakage drains batteries.  The team uses carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and solved the big problem of putting enough of these into a small area to make a useful chip.

The engineers grow CNTs on round quartz wafer and created a metal film allowing them to lift a heap of CNTs off the quartz base and put it into a silicon wafer.

The new type of memory uses titanium nitride, hafnium oxide and platinum to create metal-oxide-metal “sandwich” and use electrical switches to make conductive/resistive zeroes and ones. The researches dub this resistive random access memory (RRAM). It can be made at much lower temperatures than silicon memory.

Atomic quantum memory makes the grade

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

An atomic memory (glowing green), made at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, can be used to store quantum information in telecomunication purposes. From left to right: Michał Dąbrowski, Radek Chrapkiewicz and Wojciech Wasilewski.Physicists at the University of Warsaw claim to have developed a fully functioning atomic memory that is simple to make and with numerous applications.

The main element of the memory device is a glass chamber that is 2.5 centimetres in diameter and 10 centimetres long.  It has rubidium coated sides that are filled with one of the noble gases.

The scientists said when the tube is gently heated, rubidium pairs fill the inside and when quantum information is stored, photons from a laser beam imprint quantum states on the rubidium atoms that can then be retrieved using another laser pulse.

The researchers use a camera capable of detecting individual photons and with speeds tens of times higher than the fastest cameras.

The memory states only last from a few microseconds up to 10s of microseconds and this is useful in telecommunications which can transmit quantum signals to the next relay station.

The physicists have patents pending on some of their research efforts.

EU wants to widen “right to be forgotten”

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

thanks-for-the-memory-movie-poster-1938-1020198195European privacy regulators want Internet search engines such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing (MSFT.O) to scrub results globally, not just in Europe, when people invoke their “right to be forgotten”.

The European Union’s privacy watchdogs agreed on a set of guidelines on Wednesday to help them implement a ruling from Europe’s Supreme Court that gives people the right to ask search engines to remove personal information that is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”.

Google has been scrubbing results only from the European versions of its website such as Google.de in Germany or Google.fr in France, but they still appear on Google.com.

Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, the head of France’s privacy watchdog and the Article 29 Working Party of EU national data protection authorities, told a news conference that from the legal and technical analysis we are doing, they should include the ‘.com’.

Google said the company had not yet seen the guidelines but would “study them carefully” when they are published.

Google has previously said that search results should be removed only from its European versions since Google automatically redirects people to the local versions of its search engine.

However some feel that Google’s current approach waters down the effectiveness of the court ruling, given how easy it is to switch between different national versions.

The search engine has problems in Europe. Google is facing multiple investigations into its privacy policy and is bogged down in a four year EU antitrust inquiry.

The EU ruling has pitted privacy advocates against free speech campaigners, who say allowing people to ask search engines to remove information would lead to a whitewashing of the past.

PCs ruin family life

Posted on November 24, 2014 by - News

A happy family - WikimediaSlow PCs mean people in the UK are wasting hours messing around with machines rather than doing more constructive things like cooking, going on a date, or even having a nap.

Those are the results from memory company Crucial, which surveyed 1,148 people in the UK in November this year.

The survey estimates that the average time a person finds herself or himself waiting for a slow device each day is 6.5 minutes, adding up to 45 minutes a week or 39.4 hours a year.

Crucial comes to the conclusion that given a population of over 55.5 million people here, that adds up to a total figure for the country of 2.13 billion hours.

Twenty seven percent of people in the UK don’t think they have a good tech-life balance, with half saying they spend mre time using technology at home compared to a year ago.

More than one in 10 people spend more time at home with tech than they do with their partner.

Roddy McClean, who works at Crucial, said: “A simple computer memory upgrade is quick and easy to complete and will speed up a slow laptop or PC.”  That, he thinks, will give people more time to keep their partner happy.

Boffins print memory onto paper

Posted on July 24, 2014 by - News

postitA group of researchers from Taiwan has emerged from smoke filled labs with a method that uses ink-jet technology to print working memory on an ordinary piece of paper.

If the invention takes off then electronics printed on paper could could lead to applications such as smart labels on foods and pharmaceuticals or as wearable medical sensors.

While engineers have managed to print transistors and solar cells on paper, in the past, they have been unable to do memory.

Paper is made of fibre making it difficult to lay down the thin, uniform layers of materials that typical memory technologies need.

To get around this problem, the team, led by Ying-Chih Liao, Si-Chen Lee, and Jr-Hau He of National Taiwan University decided to build resistive random access memory (RRAM), a relatively new type of memory with a structure simple enough to cope with such surface variations.

In an RRAM device, an insulator can be set to different levels of electrical resistance by applying a voltage across it; one level of resistance corresponds to the 1s of digital logic, the other to the 0s. So each bit in RRAM consists of an insulator sandwiched by two electrodes.

The device was built with silver, titanium dioxide, and carbon, although other combinations of a metal, an insulator, and a conductor could be used. They started by using a screen-printing process to coat a carbon paste onto the paper to form the bottom electrode. The process was repeated 10 times to reduce roughness, then the coated paper was cured at 100 °C for 10 minutes in a vacuum.

Ink was made by mixing TiO2 nanoparticles in acetyl acetone and used an ink-jet printer to deposit a layer of the particles on top of the carbon, where it would act as the insulator. Once that dried, the researchers used a solution of ethylene glycol and water containing silver nanoparticles, and they printed silver dots on top of the TiO2 layer to serve as top electrodes.

The memory paper was robust and could be bent at least 1,000 times with no degradation in performance.

DRAM shortage continues to bite

Posted on January 7, 2014 by - News, Products

nand-chipsIt looks as though the shortage of DRAM will continue well into 2014.

A fire at an SK Hynix factory last year was primarily responsible for the run on DRAM and even though the company says that production has resumed, there is still an element of catch up.

According to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, speciality DRAM chips are particularly badly affected due to increased demand from various sectors for SDRAMs.

Spot prices for DDR3 memory have risen and are expected to rise even further as the year goes on.

Samsung readies a tablet blitz

Posted on January 6, 2014 by - News, Products

Samsung rules the roostGiant chaebol Samsung is readying an assault on the low end tablet market with a range of cheapo machines intended to consolidate its place in the sector.

It will introduce a Galaxy Tab 3 Lite – a seven inch unit – which is set to be priced at $129, Taiwanese wire Digitimes reports. The machine will have a 1024×600 display, use a 1.2GHz Cortex A9 microprocessor, come with 1GB of storage, have a three megapixel camera and Android 4.2, the wire reports.

But it’s not leaving it there, it seems.  It will also introduce more seven inch as well as eight inch, 10 inch and 12 inch models this year.

Samsung remains second in the tablet market, behind Apple, but wants to be number one.

Unlike Apple, and many other players in the tablet market, Samsung has its own fabs and can source memory, microprocessor, display and other components as well as use its own machine assembly lines.

UK turns into throwaway society

Posted on December 4, 2013 by - News

kettleA survey shows that 65 percent of Brits believe that it’s better to plump for new products rather than make do or upgrade existing ones.

Crucial, which has an axe to grind because it supplies memory upgrades, said it surveyed 2,000 people in the UK.

People want to replace old lamps for new whether they’re mobile phones, kettles, computers, microwaves, televisions and toasters.

One in five folk said they were expecting to spend between £100 and £300 replacing existing items in the next month.

A third – actually 34 percent – said if stuff broke down they’d rather replace them than try and fix them.

Roddy Mclean, from Crucial, said that people replaced products at the slightest sign of them slowing down. And here’s the axe grinding: “Lots of people are mssing a trick, as products such as home computers and laptops can easily be upgraded by their owners.”

Apparently one in five people surveyed are likely to trade in their computers for a new lamp rather than upgrading them. Over 90 percent of the people said their computer runs slowly or has difficulty booting.

Windows?  The survey didn’t ask that question.

Hynix downplays massive fire in chip plant

Posted on September 5, 2013 by - News

silicon-waferSK Hynix, the world’s second biggest maker of memory chips, is in damage control mode, quite literally. A blaze gutted parts of one of its plants in Wuxi, China, but the company is now trying to reassure the market by saying that damage was largely superficial.

The memory maker claims supply volume will not be affected, as there was no major damage to production equipment. It looked spectacular, but luckily the blaze doesn’t appear to have done much damage. One person suffered a minor injury and the company insists it will resume operations “in a short time period”.

However, the world was watching for good reason. The fab in question produces an estimated 15 percent of the world’s DRAM. Any extended outage would have had a massive effect on supply and prices. Luckily, SK Hynix insists the market will not be affected and the supply chain has nothing to worry about. Furthermore, the company says there is no material damage to any fab equipment in the clean room

The fire started yesterday afternoon and it took almost two hours to extinguish. What made it look a lot worse to onlookers was the fact that it churned out a lot of black smoke, which was concentrated in air purification facilities, which pretty much saved the plant but made the whole incident look a lot more ominous.

NAND prices continue surging

Posted on June 19, 2013 by - News, Products

nand-chipsPrices of NAND flash memory are set to continue rising this month and beyond, as a result of strong demand for mobile devices. According to a report from DRAMeXchange, NAND prices are showing signs of rising in the second half of June due to inventory restocking.

NAND contract prices rose two to four percent in the first half of June already, compare to May. DRAMeXchange says OEMs rushed to boost their inventories at lower prices, resulting in a shortage. The surge in demand is likely to push prices even further in the near future, despite the fact prices tend to go down seasonally over the summer, reports Focus Taiwan.

DRAMeXchange pointed out that no major manufacturers, aside from Toshiba, have any immediate plans to boost capacity in the third quarter. It concluded that NAND production between July and September is likely to rise slowly, at less than ten percent from the previous quarter.

However, demand for flash in the third quarter is expected to increase by more than 10 percent from the second quarter, resulting in a significant shortfall. Obviously, tight supply could push up NAND prices toward the end of the year.