by Anton Shilov
09/16/2002 | 04:09 PM
SDR SDRAM leaves the scene and DDR SDRAM ousts it even further due to current situation on the chipset market. The major descend in demand on SDR memory started in August (see this news-story) and by the end of the year DRAM makers predict the share of DDR SDRAM to significantly exceed to 50% of their total memory shipments. Considering the fact that DDR SDRAM is now used not only as system memory of personal computers, but is utilised in most of the videocards that are sold on the market, in notebooks and a lot of other computing devices, we can anticipate that it will dominate on the market this Winter and towards 2005, when DDR-II becomes massive.
Even this August a lot of memory manufacturers indicated that DDR share in their shipments increased 50%; take a look at the list: Nanya - 84%, Winbond - 75%, PSC - 38%, ProMOS - 35%, Samsung - 51%, Hynix - 43%, Micron - 42%, Infineon - 35% è Elpida - 22%.<%BANNER[article]%>
Samsung, the biggest player on DRAM market, plans to increase the portion of DDR memory in the shipments to 65% by the year end, as a result, in less than 12 month, the share of DDR is going to double in the shipments of this South-Korean DRAM manufacturer. The third largest memory maker in the world, Hynix, is also said to follow the same trend – by the end of 2002 70% of all DRAM chips manufactured by this company will be DDR. Micron reported that this month they enhanced the DDR products share to 50% and will further enlarge to volume to 60% by the end of the year.
Less influential companies also fully understand the importance of transition to DDR SDRAM and plan to increase the portion of DDR in manufactured products. Nanya, Powerchip Semiconductor Corporation (PSC) and ProMOS Technologies expect the DDR share to achieve 90%, 75% and 60% of their shipments respectively this year. Currently PSC have some technical and process problems with transition, while ProMOS Technologies installed the equipment needed for DDR memory manufacturing later than its rivals, thus, both companies have numerous difficulties at the moment.
Accompanied by DDR SDRAM transition, transition to 256Mbit chips from 128Mbit ones is also expected to take place.
As about RDRAM, it will apparently die on PC market without support from Intel. This year the semiconductor giant launches loads of DDR supporting core-logic products, in 2003 the company will reveal even more such devices and the only chipsets to support RDRAM will be the ones from SiS. The latter presently occupies 14% of core-logic market and a very large part of their shipments is integrated SiS650 series, intended for low-end computers, of course, with DDR SDRAM support. Where is the place for RDRAM, tell me?