Nanya Technology Reports Sequential Increase in DRAM Sales For February

Nanya Technology, one of Taiwan's and the world’s major DRAM chip manufacturers, reported a slight increase in sequential month to month sales in February. For February 2005 revenues were $NT 3.73 billion versus $NT 3.56 billion in January 2005. This was despite a 13 percent drop of the average selling price. Nanya reported a 20 percent increase in unit shipments and a 2 percent negative impact from currency exchange rates.

The sales figure for February represents a significant increase over sales for the same month last year, which were $NT 2.75 billion. For February 2005, Nanya reported that it obtained 26 percent of its revenue from China, 31 percent from America, 19 percent from EMEA, 6 percent from Japan, 15 percent from Taiwan and 3 percent from AP.  

New Chip Memory Technologies Gain Further Acceptance

The reversible phase-change memory process, a process that has already been commercialized in rewritable CD and DVD optical memory disks, has won the interest of Elpida Memory, one of the largest memory chip companies in the world. Elpida will license the technology from Ovonyx, Inc.  Elpida plans to explore the potential of the technology in its DRAM chips. Elpida is specifically interested in the technology to further DRAM acceptance in low-power high performance designs. Ovonyx has licensed its technology to a number of other semiconductor companies including Intel Corp. The polymer based technology vies to be the future replacement technology for non-volatile flash memory, along with its contenders, ferroelectric and magneto resistive process technology (MRAM).

Elpida’s Memory Chip Sales Clock In

With reports of steep drops in DRAM prices, Elpida Memory reports that it dramatically increased sales to 56.1 billion Yen for its latest quarter ended December, 31, 2004. This compares to revenue of 26.8 billion Yen for the same period last year. Net profit also increased to 3.4 billion Yen from a net loss of 9.7 billion last year. Hitachi, which owns a 25 percent stake in the venture, reported a gain of 15 billion Yen from Elpida’s initial public offering

Innovative Silicon Inc.  May Disrupt Memory and Process Market Shares

Innovative Silicon, based in Switzerland, announced today that it has taped-out its Z-RAM embedded memory technology for embedded memory applications with a 90 nm process.  The technology may become the next memory standard. This is because Innovative's memory cell requires one transistor and doesn’t require a capacitor - which results in a major reduction in memory cell size and memory chip size.   

One of the secrets to the technology, according to the company, is that the design is based on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process technology.  Specifically, the design takes advantage of a SOI parasitic effect related to the Floating Body or Body Charging effect.   The design uses a circuit to take advantage of the Floating Body effect to read and write data – instead of a capacitor.

The impact of the technology may be very great. The area required to implement embedded memory with the SOI capless cell is about half of traditional designs. Another benefit, according to the company, is that the embedded SOI capless DRAM  process requires less mask steps than the standard embedded DRAM process. This would make embedded DRAM SoCs  as cost-effective as tradtional logic SoC chips.  Becasue the process is the SOI process, DRAMs built with SOI devices result in faster and lower power memory chips than those built with standard processes.

SOI wafer suppliers may also see gold when they hear the news. The memory chip market is a major segment of the $200 billion IC market. Furthermore, the SoC market, which requires low-cost, and area optimized embedded memory, is sizable and growing. Add to this IBM’s and Advanced Micro Devices'  SOI  plans for their next generation microprocessors  - and one might find a genuine SOI shortage.