X-bit labs

Memory Market Overview: April 2005 (page 5)

Category: Memory

by Anna Filatova

[ 04/07/2005 | 09:24 PM ]

Well, this is a pretty interesting tendency, especially keeping in mind one unanswered question: what will they do with all these chips? Maybe this is the reason why we haven’t heard any news from Korea this time. Although, some news arrived from Europe, and this was very good news for Hynix, I should say. The WTO has finally made their decision about resolving the situation with the local dues that were increased up to the covering level of 34.8%. Similar measures should follow in regards to the US market, I believe.

And another piece of news from Europe can hardly be called positive. After long and exhausting legal battles, Infineon finally gave up fighting against Rambus. According to the consent decree both parties called back their claims, and Infineon will also have to pay Rambus on a quarterly basis. At least this is a not too huge sum of money they have to pay: only $5.85 million a quarter.

Rambus has been very lucky lately, actually. It looks like they are going through a renaissance. In the end of March they announced having shipped the 500-millionth RDRAM chip, and now they see their future in the XDR standard, which is becoming surprisingly more and more popular. In the very end of the month two companies announced the production of 512Mbit XDR DRAM chips: Elpida and Toshiba. The first one presented 3.2GHz chips with 6.4Gbps bandwidth, while the latter, being Rambus’ closer and more experienced XDR partner, presented 4.8GHz chip capable of reaching 9.6Gbps bandwidth. Both companies promised to start mass production of these chips this year.