Micron announced that it is shipping 2 bit per cell flash memory (MLC) and three bit per cell (TLC) 3D flash memory and that the majority of its total NAND flash output will be on 3D NAND by the second half of 2016.

The estimate of its first loss in more than two years sent the company's shares down 5.7% to $13.78 in extended trading on Tuesday.

If Tsinghua Unigroup is unable to acquire the necessary IP to build 3D NAND, I believe the Chinese company will scrap its plan to build the new fab.

Intel's move comes as the chip industry undergoes a wave of consolidation and China steps up efforts to build local technology manufacturing capacity.

SK Group is considering pouring about 46 trillion won ($38 billion) over the next few years to expand the production facilities of its chipmaking unit SK hynix, officials said Monday.

Altera has developed a storage reference design based on its Arria 10 SoCs, which doubles the life of NAND flash and can increase the number of program-erase cycles by up to 7X compared to current NAND flash implementations.

The deal, if true, could have broad implications for Micron's technology partner, Intel and NAND-chip competitor SanDisk.

SanDisk has shipped more than two billion microSD cards since it started commercial shipment of the technology ten years ago.

Micron Technology was bullish about the coming year at a conference in May, but its latest quarterly earnings released in late June have investors less optimistic.

Micron Technology said it expects a further decline in prices of chips used in personal computers, and forecast revenue for the current quarter well below market estimates.

Samsung Electronics has inked an agreement to produce its 3D NAND solid state drives for Google, in a deal deemed to beef up the South Korean manufacturer's gameplay against its global competitors.

Toshiba will decide during the next business year from April on where to build an additional memory chip plant and will consider overseas locations for the facility, according to company CEO Hisao Tanaka.

Spansion has launched a family of industrial-grade e.MMC NAND memory products for the consumer, communication and industrial equipment markets.

According to industry sources, Apple has decided to discontinue its use of triple-level cell (TLC) NAND, since the company believes that the functional defects plaguing the 64GB iPhone 6 and the 128GB iPhone 6+ stem from a problem in the controller IC of the TLC NAND flash. The controller IC in question is reportedly made by SSD maker Anobit, which was sold to Apple in 2011.

Users in Apple's support forums have recently highlighted a rare issue that causes iPhones to crash, specifically for users with a large amount of apps installed.

As numerous reports of low read performance of the Samsung SSD 840 and 840 EVO using TLC NAND flash have surfaced on the Internet, a problem in the controller IC is considered to be the more likely cause of the defects.

Toshiba has developed what it claims is the world's fastest device controller for embedded NAND flash memory modules compliant with the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Ver.2.0 and UFS Unified Memory Extension (UME) Ver.1.0 standards defined by JEDEC Solid State Technology Association (JEDEC).

Samsung Electronics Co said a memory chip plant being built in China will start operations as planned in the first half of 2014 and the company will remain flexible about further investment in the factory.

The dynamics of the solid-state state drive market are shifting, and for Abhi Talwalkar it's been a disappointing shift in 2013.

Solid-state drive adoption will continue to grow and it will be more than 10 years before it is ultimately replaced by a new memory technology, experts said.

The two companies have reached an agreement to share patents for chipmaking technologies.

With Toshiba's existing chip facilities now running at full capacity, the company may spend some of a 38% hike in its capex budget this year on extending a factory, the company's incoming president, Hisao Tanaka, said in a recent interview.

Toshiba said it will soon begin mass producing a new type of 64Gbit NAND flash that is the smallest and fastest in its class, though it still lags rival Samsung Electronics in the development of an even denser flash technology.

Increased spending in NAND and flash by Micron, LEDs by Philips and Osram, and continued investments by Globalfoundries will create new opportunities for equipment and materials suppliers in Southeast Asia.

Industry consolidation to just three big DRAM suppliers and a reduction in capital expenditures among these manufacturers helped propel DRAM average selling prices (ASPs) up 13% year over year in January. Capex budgets are also being trimmed for NAND flash (though not nearly as much as DRAM), and that, along with ongoing unit demand, has put upward pressure on ASPs for these memory devices as well.

Toshiba has subsequently brought this high level performance to its original microcontrollers and to ARM core-based microcontrollers. The newly-developed NANO Flash-100 achieves a zero-wait cycle during random access at 100MHz operation.

The M500 SSD utilizes Micron's 20nm multilevel cell (MLC) NAND flash to achieve terabyte-class capacity and enable a new level of SSD price competitiveness; the 960GB Crucial M500 SSD will be initially priced under US$600.

Apple instead picked Japan's Toshiba, Elpida Memory and Korea's SK Hynix to supply DRAM and NAND chips.

Micron Technology CEO Mark Durcan said he expects the market for chips that store files in mobile devices to improve in the first half of 2013 as manufacturers rein in supply increases.

Memory maker Spansion, which reported strong second-quarter earnings today, has an "aggressive" roadmap to boost its product-introduction rate and break its latest design-win record.

Toshiba's first-quarter operating profit is expected to exceed JPY10 billion (US$127.9 million), the Nikkei reported, more than double the profit recorded in the same period a year earlier.

Micron Technology has acquired Intel's 18% interest in IM Flash Singapore and the assets of IM Flash Technologies located at Micron's Virginia wafer fab. At the same time the scope of the JV between Intel and Micron has been expanded to include certain emerging memory technologies and Intel has prepaid US$300 million against future purchases of NAND flash memory.

LSI has announced several demonstrations of its SandForce SF-2000 flash storage processors using Toshiba 19nm and Intel 20nm NAND flash memory - the most advanced flash memory technology currently available for SSD applications.

Spansion's five-year technology roadmap includes 1Gb-8Gb SLC NAND solutions on 4Xnm technology today, 3Xnm technology by end of 2012 and 2Xnm in 2014.

Researchers have revealed details of a promising way to make a fundamentally different kind of computer memory chip.