Micron Technology has announced net profits for the quarter ended June 2 were US$75 million, down from the US$939 million posted a year ago.

Toshiba has announced that it will realign its storage products businesses in a unified organization by merging its Semiconductor Company and Storage Products Company in a new in-house company on July 1.

IM Flash Technologies, the NAND flash memory joint venture between Intel and Micron Technology, is expanding its operations in Lehi, Utah, and adding 200 jobs, according to a statement issued Monday (June 20) by Utah's Governor and the state's economic development office.

Code-named Lyndonville, the 710 will be available in 100GB, 200GB, and 300GB capacities, and use MLC NAND flash storage. The 720 Series, or Ramsdale, will be the first Intel SSD line to use PCI Express (at least a PCIe x8 slot) as the interface instead of SATA...

Consumer solid-state drives will have a break-out year in 2012 due to falling prices, which will make SSDs a primary storage option for mainstream users, Gartner said.

Toshiba has said it returned to the black for the year to March 2011, but warned the outlook remains uncertain due to the impact of the massive quake and tsunami in Japan.

Shares of NAND flash drive maker SanDisk are off by US$1.68, or 3.4%, at US$47.31 after the company reported revenue and earnings per share for 1Q slightly ahead of expectations and said Japan's disaster would not derail its earnings outlook for the year.

Intel and Micron Technology will make an announcement about NAND flash on April 14. The companies have not disclosed the details. "I believe that they will announce the finalization of their Singapore agreement-IMFS-that will bring up 25nm first and then 20nm later," said Alan Niebel, CEO of Web-Feet Research.

IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), Intel and Micron's joint venture, released 25 nanometer (nm) circuitry a little over a year ago. In the next few weeks, IMFT plans to annouce 20nm NAND flash chip production.

Toshiba said it will cooperate with Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) request to cut electricity consumption by operating only those of its businesses related to provision of essential services required for social and economic activities.

The two Toshiba-SanDisk JV semiconductor manufacturing plants, Fab 3 and Fab 4, were down for a short period of time due to the earthquake and were back up and operational as of Friday morning, Pacific Time. SanDisk's current assessment is that there has been minimal immediate impact on wafer output due to the earthquake.

Fusion-io, a maker of NAND flash memory cards that enhance the performance of data center servers, has announced that it plans an initial public offering it hopes can raise US$150 million.

Although more flash production capacity is coming online, SanDisk CEO Sanjay Mehrotra downplayed the risk that oversupply will hurt prices this year.

Micron Technology has acquired Canon's interest in Tech Semiconductor Singapore for about US$121 million, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Micron also seems to be taking the lead in its joint venture with Intel.

"We are excited to complete the transition to the next generation 2Xnm NAND components which reiterates our strategy of producing high performance SSDs at the most attractive price point available for consumer applications," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology.

The profit gain was largely due to "a significantly improved performance in electronic devices, driven mainly by the return to profit of the LCD business and demand expansion in NAND flash memories," Toshiba said in a statement.

Officials with Micron Technology have said the company intends to break ground this year on a new 50,000-square-foot research facility at its main campus in Boise. At least half of the new building will be devoted to R&D of 300mm wafer microchips.

Hynix Semiconductor said in a regulatory filing on January 6 that it plans 3.4 trillion won (US$3.03 billion) in facility investment in 2011.

Intel was expected to be a capital spending and production partner in the Singapore fab. However, Intel "is not participating" in terms of capital spending in the Singapore fab, said Micron CEO Steve Appleton. Still, over time, analysts said that Micron will go it alone in NAND and without its partner, Intel.

Toshiba will outsource fabrication of system chips to South Korea's Samsung Electronics, freeing up resources for its memory chip operations, the Nikkei business daily has reported.

The upgrade reflects improving 2011 prospects for NAND flash memory demand, driven by tablets, smartphones and solid-state drives. The improving demand picture offsets concerns about higher supply due to new NAND fabs from Samsung, Toshiba and Micron expanding production in 2011.

ASML now expects fourth-quarter bookings to be above two billion euro. "NAND flash memory investments for the high volume ramp of new technologies and foundry/logic commitments for new strategic fab projects are driving brisk lithography demand for 2011..."

Micron and SanDisk are chief competitors of South Korean chip giants Samsung Electronics and Hynix Semiconductor in the memory-processor market.

Micron Technology is investing US$56 million to expand its Manassas facility and bring 123 new jobs to the area, Virginia officials said Tuesday.

Shares of SanDisk jumped Monday after a Robert W. Baird analyst upgraded the stock, projecting better prices for the company's flash memory cards heading into next year. The analyst even predicted there could be NAND shortages in the second half of 2011.

Toshiba will shut its No.2 plant in Yokkaichi, central Japan, by the end of December and phase out low-end chips used in products such as memory sticks. The company will also farm out production of so-called logic chips next year to cut costs at a business that's "barely breaking even."

The sale of new tablet PCs and smartphones with solid-state storage technology is compensating for weak demand for memory cards and USB flash drives, and has led to a 17% quarter-to-quarter increase in NAND flash shipments and an average price drop of about 9%.

Intel, Toshiba and Samsung Electronics will join hands to develop technologies that could more than halve semiconductor line widths to nearly 10 nanometers by 2016, the Nikkei daily reported.

The Nikkei business daily recently reported that the resistive random access memory chip to be developed by Elpida and Sharp could write data 10,000 times faster than NAND flash memory technology, while consuming less power. The next-generation memory chip is expected to be commercialized around 2013.

OCZ Technology is teaming up with SandForce to deliver exceptional new SSD products that leverage SATA3 and cost-effective NAND flash components. OCZ is set to begin sample distribution to current and potential clients in the fourth quarter of 2010, with mass production beginning in the first quarter of 2011.

One analyst says yes, saying that Micron is going it alone in NAND and without Intel. Intel is not commenting, saying the analyst is only speculating without hard data.

"In the DRAM sector, Hynix, which focuses its production on 44-nano DRAM products, aims to finish its development of 38-nano products within this year for mass production early next year," a company spokesman said.

In a nutshell, DRAM suffers from data and power concerns, NAND flash is plagued by reliability issues, and system integration is becoming more complex...

The analyst do not expect a meaningful acceleration in enterprise SSD adoption in 2010, but his analysis suggests as system availability improves in the second half of 2010, shipments are set to grow dramatically in 2011.

Violin Memory has introduced a 40TB capacity flash memory array for enterprises that uses multi-level cell (MLC) NAND and costs less than US$16 per GB.

Pliant Technology has introduced a new family of lower-cost, higher-capacity solid state drives (SSD) based on consumer-grade NAND flash memory but built for data center use.

As analyst Simon Dong-je Woo notes in a research report, TLC NAND pricing is down about 20% already in the current quarter. And he also reports that SanDisk has more exposure to TLC NAND than other players in the sector, accounting for 65% of the company's overall NAND chip sales.

It took firefighters from Boise about a half an hour to put out the fire, which broke out in a building that helps support the company's development of solar panels.

Micron Technology has confirmed its support for the phase-change memory product line and R&D inherited when it acquired Numonyx in May 2010. But a company executive declined to give further details of its technology roadmap or how it plans to scale the technology below the 45nm node.

"Apple and other OEMs have procured large volumes of flash, which has forced others to double book in order to get some of the allocation. This action cascaded into other markets especially NOR and serial NOR, where they became supply constrained and prices rose..."