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3 Feb 20098 Jan 20096 Jan 20095 Jan 200929 Dec 200819 Dec 200817 Dec 20088 Dec 20083 Dec 20081 Dec 200811 Nov 200810 Nov 20086 Nov 200821 Oct 20089 Oct 200830 Sep 200824 Sep 200823 Sep 20084 Sep 20083 Sep 200829 Aug 20083 Jul 2008
Spansion's president and chief executive, Bertrand Cambou, has resigned as the chip company, struggling with declining revenue, looks for a suitor.
AP (via Forbes)
SanDisk said Monday that hefty charges to write down the value of assets and inventory amid industrywide price reductions forced the world's largest supplier of flash memory cards to post a larger-than-expected fourth-quarter loss.
AP (via Google)
The SD Association has announced the next-generation SDXC (eXtended Capacity) memory card specification which will provide up to 2TB storage capacity and accelerate SD interface read/write speeds to 104MB/s this year, with a road map to 300MB/s. Specifications for the new SDXC standard will be released in the first quarter of 2009.
Company release
Samsung Electronics denied a report saying it may cut its 2009 investment in semiconductors by more than half from last year amid a lingering downturn. "At this point, we have not made any decisions on our investment plan, and even if we had a plan it would be contingent on different economic scenarios that will be possible during this year," Chu-Woo-sik, Samsung's executive vice president of investor relations, told Reuters.
Reuters
Taipei-based DRAMeXchange has lowered its outlook for 2009 NAND Flash bit growth from 108.2% to 81%. The market intelligence company cites weakened demand for flash memory as the source, stemming from a decrease in forecast demand for flash memory-based consumer devices in 2009.
Tom's Hardware Guide
Toshiba will likely delay the construction of a new memory chip plant in western Japan by half a year due to slow progress in land acquisition, the Nikkei business daily said, citing President Atsutoshi Nishida.
Reuters
Toshiba says it will debut a 512GB solid state hard drive during the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show.
Washington Post
"The joint venture is evaluating plans for operations over the holiday season, including a possible stoppage of some production lines," a SanDisk spokesman said Friday. "We constantly consider manufacturing schedules in light of market requirements and this is particularly true during the holiday season," he added. This follows a Bloomberg report that said Toshiba is considering a "partial stoppage" of flash memory production in Japan over the holidays.
CNET
"The sector is in a dire situation," said Toshiba Senior Executive Vice President Masashi Muromachi. "Sales prices tumbled 40 percent or so in the first half and they are falling faster than expected in the second half." Muromachi also said that World Semiconductor Trade Statistics's revised forecast for 6.5% growth in global sales of semiconductors in 2010 was still high.
Reuters
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel are teaming up to produce solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers and workstations, the companies said Tuesday. Under terms of the deal, drive maker Hitachi GST will only use NAND flash chips obtained from Intel in its high-end SSDs. The two companies will jointly develop drives that use Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces, with products expected to hit the market in 2010, they said. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
PC World
Japan's Toshiba said it planned to increase its output of flash memory-based solid state drives (SSDs) 15-fold over the next two years, aiming to control half of the global market for the new memory devices.
Reuters
Chip makers are shutting down less-productive factories, delaying investment projects and even cutting staff in a sign that the global economic slowdown and the credit crunch are taking a hefty toll on demand and hurting their operations. The coming few months could be critical for several memory-chip makers in Asia, Europe and the US as they continue to grapple with weak demand and a severe cash crunch amid plunging chip prices, which remain well below their manufacturing costs.
Wall Street Journal
PRAM, known as perfect RAM, is the next-generation memory chip which features the advantages of NAND and NOR flash memories. Samsung will begin mass production of 65-nano 512MB PRAM in the first half of 2009 for the first time in the world.
ETNews.com
SanDisk has been hurt by falling prices for NAND memory chips, a type of flash memory the company makes for consumer gadgets like music players and digital cameras. But a Goldman Sachs analyst said key intellectual property rights associated with the chips give the SanDisk more value than the market has recognized.
CNNMoney
SanDisk has released details of its new flash management technology, ExtremeFFS (Extreme Flash File System) which has the potential to extend endurance and accelerate SSD random write speeds by as much as 100 times compared with existing systems.
Company release
SanDisk said it is still "open" to a Samsung buyout offer and hinted at more restructuring to come, as the largest supplier of retail flash memory cards reported a third-quarter 2008 net loss of US$155 million on Monday. The loss was significantly worse than the net income of US$85 million reported in the third quarter of 2007. SanDisk and other flash memory chip suppliers have been hit by a steep price decline in flash.
CNET
SanDisk may have just concluded a multibillion-dollar patent licensing lawsuit with Samsung which could determine the future of both SanDisk and the flash industry at large. As SanDisk considers a US$5.8 billion takeover offer by the flash giant, private arbitration has given Sandisk rights to a technology that may well hold the future of flash memory.
Ars Technica
The world's biggest flash memory chipmaker said it has recently begun shipping 16-gigabit multi-level cell (MLC) flash chips to clients using the 42nm level. Samsung's bigger Japanese rival Toshiba and Hynix Semiconductor are still using 43-nanometer and 48-nanometer technology, respectively.
The Korea Times
"Yes, Samsung is still in (merger) talks with SanDisk," Kwon Oh-hyun, head of the company's semiconductor division told The Korea Times on the sidelines of a business forum held at the National Assembly. "Samsung's legal team has reviewed measures to calm down a possible anti-trust issue in the United States if the deal succeeds," Kwon said. U.S. financial regulators would most likely reject the proposed deal because it would create a near monopoly in the flash memory market, analysts say.
The Korea Times
...Eventually the industry will need an entirely new technology, and SanDisk believes it has the solution in 3D memory, the technology it gained through the January 2006 acquisition of Matrix Semiconductor. The concept behind 3D memory is that you can simply stack arrays of cells vertically to increase storage density rather than increasing the size (and cost) of the chip. It’s like building a skyscraper rather than expanding the footprint of a building. SanDisk says it has more than 200 patents around 3D memory...
CNET
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