ITotals: October`2002
Memory
The month was rather hot as far as current news and technological plans are concerned. The market got a new serious player - Elpida, joint enterprise of NEC and Hitachi. It agreed upon a strategic alliance with PowerChip and Mitsubishi, within the frames of which Elpida is to get the DRAM business of Mitsubishi and all three companies are to work in cooperation on the 0.11 micron technological process.
By the way, Hynix announced the 0.10 micron 512 Mbit DDR SDRAM chip and is going to start its mass production by the turn of the year. However, this fab process will hardly become world-wide adapted as most manufacturers still prefer 0.13-0.15 micron techniques. For example, Nanya that received the 0.11 micron technology from IBM, is currently switching over only to the 0.14 micron process.
One of the key events in October was the scandal stirred up by Infineon and Mosel Vitelic, a joint owner of their enterprise ProMOS; Infenion took up the issue of persistent material damages and has been pressing for the entire control over sales of the ProMOS memory. It seems that the relations of the partners are taking a bad turn now, but it mustn't be a big blow for Infineon as the company has been collaborating with Winbond and Nanya for a long while. At present Infineon purchases about 30% of chips from Winbond, but by the year end the figure can reach 50%. Thankfully, there are channels to push them off - Kingston declared it was going to increase the share of chips bought from Infineon from 10% to 20-30%.
It's interesting which type is implied because in October Kingston started deliveries of PC3200 modules from the ValueRAM family, though they are highly overclocked. Others keep on speeding up; thus, several manufacturers released modules clocked at 434 MHz (3500 MB/s), with the CAS equal to 2.0, i.e. the performance is OK. But they guarantee flawless operation of only one such module on a mainboard. Well, can anyone understand mad overclockers?
PC3500 DDR
Besides, the DDR-II is coming very soon - Micron already demonstrated 256 Mbit 533 MHz DDR-II chip of 4300 MB/s and then a prototype of a server using modules on such chips. The vague shapes of the DDR-III are becoming sharper - further voltage decrease (1.2-1.5 V), bigger size (from 4 Gbit), higher frequency - from 800 to 1500 MHz (DDR).
First samples will arrive in 2007.
The situation in the video sector is more optimistic - ATI showed off its first video card with DDR-II and completed development of the special specification of the graphics memory GDDR-3 based on the DDR-II with the throughput of 1-1.5 Gbit/s per output, which is almost twice greater than the throughput of DDR-II chips. Contrary to DDR-II, GDDR-3 chips will pour onto the shelves in the first half of 2003.
On the flash memory market we have a new promoted format - xD, which is due to replace the CompactFlash entirely in two years.
xD is in the center
Olimpus is now designing all its new digital photo cameras for the xD format, and owners of the old models can use such an adapter:
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