X-bit labs

Annual Hardware Overview: A Glance Back at the Year 2003 (page 12)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 01/08/2004 | 11:51 PM ]

As for the manufacturers, I have no doubts about them: they have long and easily moved to 0.10-0.11micron production process necessary for DDR2 chips manufacturing. Even Hynix raised up enough money for the shift (Hynix was feeling surprisingly well in 2003, by the way). But as for particular names, let me first present the following table to you, Semico Research’s version of the annual results:

According to the table, both Samsung and Micron lost something of their market shares in 2003, although Samsung shouldn’t be dismissed altogether – the company just switched to flash. Micron, received a nice gift from Intel as the processor giant bought Micron stock for $450 million. Micron just has to invest the money in a smart way…Infineon skyrocketed up but is unlikely to repeat the trick in 2004. Hynix lost its seat in the first trio, but has a chance of returning: the company has been showing very nice dynamics lately in spite of all the protective duties in the European Union and the USA. Nanya won’t hold to its fifth place – they were hasty in breaking apart with Kingston, which was a billion-dollar client. ProMOS, Elpida (who enrolled Intel and Kingston as its stockholders) and Powerchip are likely to go up in the rankings: their ambition is expanding along with their production facilities.

As for our High Life Chronicles, the quarrel about ProMOS was something unheard of before. The year 2003 started with Mosel Vitelic’s attempt to grasp control over ProMOS in the board of directors. Infineon got it back in court, but lost its patience on the way. So, the Germans started selling their ProMOS stock and withdrew the license for their production technologies. After that, ProMOS said they wanted to be friends with Infineon in the future and had no claims at all and were ready to call back their suit, if Infineon started buying its own chips from ProMOS. Quite cynical, as our modern age goes.

Infineon of course put a full stop at that, and ProMOS had to dispose those chips they used to sell to the Germans. In summer, the Taiwanese negotiated with Elpida the technological collaboration and selling up to 10 thousand wafers to Elpida monthly. It seemed quite a logical variant, but in October it was revealed that ProMOS was building its new 300mm fab without any help from the Japanese company. This was recognized as a rift in the relationship.

However, the information dated December about ProMOS finding another partner, Hynix, was much of a surprise. Simultaneously, ProMOS announced its purchase of 50% of Mosel Vitelic and of the patents and technologies related to memory and flash. Overall, this is an active preparation to the company’s great goal scheduled for the second quarter of 2004: selling 100% of produce under their own brand. If the plans come true, the ProMOS sales volumes will grow in 2004 no less than in 2003.

The last sensation of 2004 has to do with Rambus. For the first half of the year, the Japanese fans of the company (I really wonder why the Japanese like Rambus so much – maybe some personal relationships?) licensed the well-designed high-speed serial data-transfer interface aka Yellowstone. They were Sony, Toshiba, Elpida…It means we may one day see this interface implemented in the Cell processor and, accordingly, in the PlayStation 3. And Rambus will keep on raking the licensing fees in.

In the second half of the year, Elpida and Toshiba announced a new memory architecture called XDR DRAM, which is of course Yellowstone-based. They talk about fantastic frequencies (3.2-6.4GHz) and bandwidth (up to 100GB/s). This is not pure sci-fi: in December, Toshiba did show a 512Mbit 3.2GHz XDR DRAM chip. So, this memory seems to be technologically plausible, just like RDRAM was a few years ago. They just need to convince Intel of the necessity of making a second try.