Product News I ICs & Semiconductors
NAND flash memory market takes hit in second quarter
According to research from iSuppli a severe oversupply of 3-bit-per-cell parts used for removable memory cards and USB drives caused a temporary interruption of growth in the red-hot NAND-type flash memory market in the second quarter. After five consecutive quarters of sequential expansion due to strong demand and short supplies, global revenue from shipments of NAND-type flash memory declined to $4.1 billion in the second quarter, down 6.5 percent from $4.3 billion in the first quarter.
However, the company expects that after the second quarter dip, the NAND flash market will return to sequential growth for the next five quarters.
The 3-bit-per-cell (TLC) flash parts represent the latest technological development in the NAND market, allowing the storage of three bits of information in each memory cell, tripling the density of a given flash device. This type of NAND has enjoyed strong acceptance in memory cards and USB drives. In comparison, the other large consumers of NAND - embedded applications and mobile communications - use 2-bit-per-cell Multilevel Cell (MLC) and 1-bit-per-cell Single Level Cell (SLC) flash.
“The NAND flash market is officially on a winning streak, amid strong demand and short supplies,” said Michael Yang, manager of memory/storage systems, for iSuppli. “However, soaring production of TLC parts has resulted in these parts going into oversupply, causing prices to decline and bringing down revenue for the entire NAND market in the second quarter.”
The oversupply situation spurred a sharp decline in pricing for TLC NAND. Pricing for TLC and MLC flash was nearly at parity in
January, but by the end of June, TLC’s pricing fell far below that of MLC.
NAND interrupted
Despite the second-quarter hiccup, iSuppli expects global NAND revenue to rise by 32 percent for the entire year of 2010 to reach a record $17.9 billion.
But while the oversupply problems are limited to TLC and are expected to be short lived.
In the second half, supply and demand for the TLC NAND will be more balanced as demand for USB and cards increase during the holiday seasons. There will be a continued
Altera has enhanced its Arria II GX FPGA variant with 6.375-Gbps transceivers and up to 1.25-Gbps LVDS support, while broadening the reach of the family with the addition of the new Arria II GZ FPGA variant. As a result, the 40-nm Arria II family provides the lowest power 6-Gbps transceiver solution currently available and features up to 50 percent lower static power over competitive devices. Many applications commonly
implemented in FPGAs are moving to faster transceiver speeds, driven by the need to support mainstream protocol standards such as PCI Express (PCIe) Gen2, SATA III, CPRI-6G, Interlaken and RXAUI. In addition, system power consumption is becoming an increasingly challenging design constraint. Arria II GX FPGAs feature up to sixteen 6.375-Gbps transceivers and faster I/Os than the previous generation of Arria II FPGAs, making them suitable for a broad array of applications in markets that include:wireless,
wireline, test, medical and storage. With Arria II GZ devices, customers can achieve the power-reduction benefits of the Arria II family across applications with significantly higher bandwidth requirements. The new Arria II GZ FPGAs feature up to twenty-four 6.375-Gbps transceivers, up to 400-MHz DDR3 interfaces and up to 726 I/Os. Furthermore, its processing capacity has been increased to include a PCIe Gen2 hard intellectual property (IP) block, 30 percent more multipliers and 25 percent more user
shortage of MLC NAND as smart phones and tablets sees sustained demand from consumers. One major factor driving the robust demand for NAND flash is rising demand from smart phones, a phenomenon spurred by Apple Inc.’s iPhone.
“Apple has set the benchmark with its wildly popular iPhones and the rest of the industry is more or less resigned to play catch-up,” Yang said. “One hallmark of the iPhone feature set is embedded storage: equipped with up to 32Gbytes of flash memory, consumers are no longer hindered by what they can load onto the device—be it music, videos, emails with attachments, or as many apps as one can download. The surge in storage requirements among smart phones alone has pushed average flash memory density in such products to grow by 317 percent to 1.3Gbyte in 2010.
iSuppli I
www.isuppli.com Altera shipping lowest power FPGAs with 6.375-Gbps transceivers
logic than the original Arria II GX family. According to Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of product marketing at Altera Corporation: "The extension to the Arria II family will help boost the number of applications that will benefit from the capabilities of these new devices." With protocol reference designs, a new Arria II GX Development Kit, 6G Edition and easily- accessible online design resource centers, designers can easily meet the challenges of high-speed serial transceiver design with Arria II GX and GZ FPGAs. Altera's transceiver technology provides easy-to-use signal integrity features that accelerate product development, while consuming less power than competing solutions and quickly resolving transceiver design challenges. The Arria II GX and GZ families feature up to 350K logic elements (LEs) and up to 16.4 Mb of embedded memory.
Altera |
www.altera.com
www.cieonline.co.uk
Components in Electronics July/August 33
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