December 2004 Electronic Issue

Electronics companies struggle to meet the vague requirements of the EU's lead-free law

The EU law restricts the use of six hazardous chemicals in electronic equipment: lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls, polybrominated diphenyl ethers and cadmium, however, the EU has yet to specify the maximum amounts allowed for each chemical or even which categories of electronics products will be exempt.

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Searching for stability

Purchasing managers are not expecting many changes in the next 30 days, roughly two-thirds of respondents are not expecting any change in business conditions. With most companies taking a wait-and-see attitude for next month, look for pricing and supply conditions to remain relatively stable and companies to maintain their inventory levels.

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Samsung Leaps 53%, Infineon Climbs 2 Seats in Semi Ranking

With Samsung expected to show the largest growth rate of 53 percent from last year thanks to surging DRAM and flash memory sales, Infineon will climb two spots to the number five position helped out by the increasing strength of the euro.

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Intel expected to follow AMD's CPU integration

With the integration of the company's memory controller and high-speed interconnect to its Xeon and Itanium server processors, Intel is expected to follow a path pioneered by Advanced Micro Devices. Expected to help bring the two Intel CPU architectures into price parity, the integrated processors will create a relatively streamlined yet powerful all-serial server chip. This shift is not expected until 2007.

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High-rise circuitry lures chip makers

Matrix, Tessaron and Irvine Sensors recently reported progress with individual takes on semiconductor stacking. With 3-D devices that have a smaller footprint than conventional 2-D circuits, Tezzaron's 4-Mbit SRAM comes in a 7 x 7 package - one-sixth the size of a standard 119-pin BGA. Other manufactures like Irvine Sensors Corp. are stacking two to four layers of DRAM, flash or SRAM into a package that has the same outline as a single BGA chip.

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How Fresh is the 128 Mbyte Sushi?

Solid Alliance are offering flash memory modules that look like sushi and rubber ducks? That's right, utilizing USB connectors, the sushi modules come in several "flavors" such as cucumber maki and the duckling modules come in a number of colors in densities up to 256 MB.

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Renesas merges East and West

Renesas is weaving together product lines, marketing, sales and manufacturing using training, communication and persuasion to create a new way of doing business, striving to meld the best aspects of East and West. Renesas is trying to create a culture that can compete in the fast-changing chip industry, a culture with fewer management layers, quicker decisions, a more global outlook and a more Western leadership than is typical in Japan.

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Phones replace PCs as memory trendsetters

Memory capacity in handsets has rapidly increased as the market has shifted from simple voice terminal to feature phones, smart phones and mobile media gateways. Phones have sprouted operating systems, huge code spaces and file systems driving the demand for flash and the need for fast-write memory to store volatile data.

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Memory alternatives wait for flash to flame out

Emerging technologies such as MRAM and carbon nanotubes hover over the market waiting to become the next top nonvolatile memory of the future, providers of today's dominane flash memories are showing a burst of new optimism. According to their most recent lab results, there is a suggestion that flash may be scalable into at least 2007 or 2008, way beyond the lifetime of some emerging technologies.

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Spansion moves NOR flash density into NAND territory

Current thinking about the roles of NOR and NAND flash could be upended triggering a drastic shift in market share in its favor and maybe even changing the way audio, video and image data are compress for storage in mobile devices - if Spansion LLC has its way.

Spansion, jointly owned by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Fujitsu Ltd., has released a road map that carries the companies NOR flash device from the 110-nanometer, 512-Mbit devices already in production through the 45-nm process node and to densities of 8 Gbits per die, nearly overtaking the NAND flash road maps of the company's competitors.

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