My regular clients who get quarterly in-person market updates and those readers who have attended my annual Flash Market Update session at the Flash Memory Summit have often been told how Objective Analysis models the memory market based on supply/demand dynamics and the fact that memory chip prices tend to follow a very predictable pattern.  In this post The Memory Guy blog will explain that pattern to those unfamiliar with it and will show where we are, leading to an outlook on what to expect from here. Typical Pricing Behavior Since this is an abbreviated explanation I won’t go into mu ..read more

Infineon recently introduced a NOR flash chip with an LPDDR interface.  Some clients have asked The Memory Guy: “Why would Infineon have done that?” After all, LPDDR is mostly used in cell phones, and these boot from the enormous NAND flash that’s already in the phone.  A byte of NAND is a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper than a byte of NOR, so a cell phone’s not going to use this part. Infineon tells us that their target market is automotive electronics: engine & transmission control, instrumentation, etc.  You don’t need a huge NAND flash if you’re not storing photos ..read more

Now that Intel is exiting the Optane market what will happen to the market for new memory technologies?  This is an interesting question that The Memory Guy has focused considerable attention over the past few years.  In a nutshell, the market will continue to develop, but at a slower pace, with the bulk of revenue growth going to memories embedded into SoCs. Even so, the market will grow significantly, with revenues reaching a solid $44 billion by 2031.  This is explained in the update to the Objective Analysis and Coughlin Associates acclaimed annual report on emerging memory ..read more

I wasn’t aware of any NAND memories prior to NAND flash, but recently learned that the idea wasn’t new, and other developments that enabled NAND flash were also developed before NAND flash memory was invented. Although these ideas never reached commercial success the way that NAND flash did, they certainly made NAND flash possible, so they deserve some mention in The Memory Guy blog. The earlier device was an EPROM, which was the only reprogrammable nonvolatile memory from 1971 until EEPROM’s introduction in the 1974.  EPROM remained the leading type of reprogrammable nonvolatile memory u ..read more

On Friday 30 September 2022 Kioxia announced a 30% NAND flash wafer production cut in response to worsening market conditions.  Kioxia’s manufacturing partner, Western Digital (WDC), decided not to comment on the Kioxia announcement. If Kioxia’s announcement sounds familiar to you that’s because the company made the exact same announcement a decade ago in July 2012.  As was explained in The Memory Guy blog, Toshiba’s subsequent financial reports for that period indicated that the company actually increased production that year rather than decreasing it. As for WDC, a move of this mag ..read more

In his latest post on The Memory Guy, contributor Ron Neale reviews a novel use for ReRAM cells in which a neural processing system mimics the direction-finding mechanism of a barn owl’s ears.  This is based on research performed by CEA-Leti in France, which was recently published in the journal Nature. The potential for the use of the unique characteristics of ReRAMs, PCM and CeRAMs as brain-gates, neuromorphic devices, and in-memory computation has long been recognised. In a paper recently published in Nature , inspired by the auditory system of the barn owl, a team from: CEA-Leti, Gren ..read more

The Memory Guy is pleased to announce the availability of a new Objective Analysis Brief, which is our name for a white paper.  It’s called The Future of the Data Center. The paper explores the new horizons of computing, including disaggregation, AI, IoT, etc., and explains the many different memory approaches that are being used or developed to enable these technologies, ranging from computational storage to DDR5 and CXL Look for it at the top of the list of free documents on our White Papers page at Objective-Analysis.com.   ..read more

An August 8 investigative report by Reuters revealed that many of the missiles that Russia has been raining down on Ukraine include US chip technology.  The Memory Guy thought that it might be good not to simply react, but to provide some deeply considered insight into how that could have happened, and what it might mean. The Story Russian missiles that failed to explode in Ukraine have been examined and found to include chips made by US-based companies.  The Reuters article includes close-up photos of chips from Texas Instruments, Maxim Integrated Products (now a part of Analog Devi ..read more

In this post contributor Ron Neale takes a very deep look into a new paper published by Symetrix,  Cerfe Labs  and university researchers which provides fresh insights to the inner workings of CeRAM (Correlated electron RAM), an innovative class of non-volatile memory, where carbon doping of nickel oxide NiO leads to a new type of electronics based electron interaction.  With the recently-disclosed material as background, he then adopts the position of Devil’s Advocate to explore alternative views of the memory switching mechanism and to test the proposition that CeRAM is not si ..read more

During Micron’s May 12 Investor Day Conference the company presented a number of new memory technologies and one compelling new business strategy that The Memory Guy thought were worth sharing.  The audience learned of yet-another planar DRAM process node, Micron’s layer count for its next-generation NAND, how a portion of its proprietary SSD controller has been absorbed into the NAND chips, and finally of a new approach to contracts to help manage memory chips’ notorious price swings. 1εnm DRAM (that’s an epsilon!) The only Greek I ever learned was in college, where the Greek alphabet wa ..read more