Memory

Attempts by the State of Saxony to save the 3,200 Saxony-based jobs of Qimonda have failed because Qimonda's parent won't match the State's offer of a Euros 150m loan.

“Spansion’s MirrorBit technology pushes the boundaries of flash memory technology forward,” said Mike Scott, Mouser v-p of active products

Spansion has put 65nm NOR flash into production at its Japanese fab at Aizu. Two densities are being shipped, 512Mbit and 1Gbit. The next introduction on 65nm will be the company's Eclipse family which combines the characteristics of NOR and NAND.

The government of Taiwan is said to be symnpathetic with some reports saying that the government has agreed to provide loans to memory makers

Intel has teamed with disk-drive specialist Hitachi Global Storage Technologies to develop solid-state memory drives for servers, workstations and storage systems

Qimonda applies to the Federal Government of Germany for a bail-out, according to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. Potentially, it could become the first nationalized DRAM company.

Reports from the Kyodo news agency suggest that Toshiba may postpone plans to build a a couple of NAND flash fabs that were due to come on-stream in 2010.

IM Flash Technologies, the NAND flash joint venture between Micron Technology and Intel, has cranked up the pressure on NAND flash rivals Samsung Electronics, Toshiba and Hynix Semiconductor, by moving to a new generation of process technology much earlier than expected.

The first steps towards doing that are today’s legal actions in the International Trade Commission (ITC) and the US District Court in Delaware, against Samsung asserting that the Korean company is in breach of Spansion patents

Samsung is alleged to have violated five Spansion patents relating to floating-gate technology, which represents 90% of the flash memory market