Items tagged with Elpida
For years, RAM has followed a predictable pattern in the computing industry. New standards debut, with questionable performance gains and at significantly higher costs compared to previous products. As time passes, the new standard is adopted by more and more chipsets and vendors until it becomes dominant. Costs drop, volume rises, and everyone is happy. Now, however, Apple is expected to account for up to 25% of all DRAM sales next year -- more than any other vendor -- and that simple fact could have a significant impact on the adoption of next-generation standards. Mobile Over Desktop According to analysts, demand for Apple's iPhone 6, 6 Plus, and a rumored iPad Air with 2GB of RAM instead...
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It's a done deal, and just like that, two have become one in the memory universe. Micron and Elpida have just announced the closing of their merger, which has Micron acquiring 100% of Elpida's equity. The deal was initially hammered out in July of 2012, and just now was completed. In a related transaction, Micron also announced today the completion of its acquisition of a 24 percent share of Rexchip Electronics Corporation from Powerchip Technology Corporation and certain of its affiliates. The transactions will be recorded for accounting purposes as being effective at 11:59 p.m., Tokyo time, on July 31, 2013. Elpida's assets include a 300 millimeter (mm) DRAM fabrication facility located in...
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Micron Technology, founded in 1978 in Boise, Idaho and one of the state's largest employers, announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire struggling Elpida Memory in a deal worth $2.5 billion. Under terms of the agreement, Micron will acquire a 100 percent stake in Elpida in exchange for a lump sum cash payment of 60 billion Yen (about $750 million), followed by 140 billion Yen (around $1.75 billion) in future annual installment payments through 2019 for foundry services provided by Elpida. "We are creating the industry-leading pure-play memory company," said Micron CEO Mark Durcan. "Today's transactions will help strengthen the combined companies' market position in the memory industry...
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Two of the major needs of mobile device components are lower power consumption and greater speed. Elpida Memory’s next-gen 4Gb Wide IO Mobile RAM and DDR3 Mobile RAM (LPDDR3) are designed to address both of these issues. The Wide IO Mobile RAM boasts 12.8GBps per chip at 200MHz by using the extra-wide x512-bit data width and a purported 50% drop in power consumption. Elpida’s new LPDDR3 memory offers twice the data rate as LPDDR2, at 6.4GBps or 12.8GBps depending on configuration, and claims it consumes 25% less power. Elpida will soon develop two-layer 8-gigabit and four-layer 16-gigabit products based on the new RAM platforms. Meanwhile, mass production of the Wide IO Mobile and...
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The tendency of DRAM to become cheaper over time is generally considered a good thing—at least, in the consumer market—but evidence suggests prices may have fallen a bit too much. Current manufacturing costs using 40nm technology is about US $1.50 while the selling price for a 2Gb part is currently $1.17 - $1.31. This is less a problem for the top-tier RAM manufacturers who are using 30nm tech, but there's no way for smaller players to quickly migrate to the updated process. Selling parts below the cost of manufacture is obviously unsustainable over the long term, a fact that has left the DRAM companies contemplating production cuts. Such cuts aren't made lightly; companies have typically...
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Remember that 50 nanometer DDR3 SDRAM that Elpida developed late last year? Good news -- production is underway on it. For those of you just dying to get more memory into the netbooks, notebooks and UMPCs of today, Elpida Memory has begun mass producing what it's calling the industry's highest density 2Gb Mobile RAM using 50nm process technology.The work is being done at the company's Hiroshima fabrication plant, leveraging ArF immersion lithography and copper interconnect technology in order to add greater functionality to the module. Said device uses an an x32-bit I/O configuration based on double-data rate (DDR) that can operate at the fast speed of 400Mbps (200MHz) to transmit data at the...
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