nand

Industry insiders are accusing Apple of manipulating the price of NAND flash memory chips used in its popular iPhone and iPod products, according to a report in The Korea Times on Monday.

Citing unnamed sources, the article says Apple asks manufacturers to produce more chips than it eventually buys from Samsung Electronics and Hynix Semiconductor. The sources said Apple waits for the price of the chips to fall before making its purchase.

The practice of not buying all of the product originally ordered, semiconductor analyst Jim Handy told CNET, is "not uncommon in the industry."

Handy, of market … Read more

Global semiconductor sales are now expected to fall this year by 11 percent--an improvement over the previous estimate of a 17 percent drop, according to research released Monday by Gartner. And the outlook for 2010 is sunny.

Revenue is projected to drop this year to $226 billion, an 11.4 percent decline from last year's $255 billion. Next year however, it's expected to bounce back by 13 percent from this year's level, hitting the same $255 billion figure it did in 2008.

Personal computers are the largest factor driving semiconductor sales. In another recent report, Gartner said … Read more

Memory chip makers will offer more sophisticated flash drives for smartphones--technology that will be comparable to the solid-state drives found in laptops today.

Today's flash drives, which typically range up to 32GB in capacity in products like Apple's iPhone, often use relatively unsophisticated techniques for reading and writing data. In general, the technology is not very different from that used in basic cell phones or digital cameras, according to Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron's memory group.

But as smartphones--and possible future tablet devices--become more like personal computing devices and less like basic MP3 players, memory chip … Read more

Apple said Tuesday that it has made a $500 million prepayment to Toshiba for flash memory chips and indicated the market is stabilizing.

"The NAND flash market has now begun to stabilize and we expect it to move to a slight demand imbalance," said Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook in Apple's Tuesday earnings conference call. (The call is available as an audio Webcast on Apple's Web site.) The news was reported earlier by Reuters.

"In terms of the Toshiba prebuy, we did a long-term supply agreement with Toshiba, as a part of that, as … Read more

Adaptec has announced the immediate availability of a Series 5Z Unified Serial (SATA/SAS) RAID controller family with "Zero Maintenance Cache Protection." It's designed to replace the current generation of RAID controllers that use lithium ion batteries to protect data in cache memory.

This announcement is significant for two reasons. First, its shows the expanding role of NAND flash. Recently, NAND flash has been associated with the second coming of solid state disk (SSD) in enterprise disk arrays. In spite of reliability issues (the more flash memory is written to, the less reliable it becomes over time), … Read more

Clickfree just announced its new Traveler external hard drive that uses the same file-based transfer software we reviewed in the Clickfree Portable Backup Drive back in January. The difference is that this device uses solid-state technology for faster transfers and increased durability.

Clickfree stresses that its file-based software is different from other backup solutions that only create an image of the host computer onto their drives. During this "total backup," the drive will restore operating systems and applications, but also winds up restoring viruses, malware, and corrupt files.

Clickfree's automatic backup software only restores your "irreplaceable … Read more

There is a lot about pants in today's episode. I mean, the French Parliament killed the Net piracy bill, Conficker started adding a key logger, and the AP does more stupid stuff. But really, it's all about pants. The new "Star Trek" movie was shown to a surprised group of Austin fans. Apparently, it melted one man's pants, it was so good. And there are also some robotic pants in today's show. But, the show is far from pants in the British sense. Just listen.

French … Read more

Solid-state drives may see heady growth despite a sliding world economy, according to a report released Tuesday by a market research company. Devices like the Apple iPod and iPhone are expected to drive growth.

Flash memory revenue in the solid-state drive segment will see compound annual growth rates of over 100 percent through 2012, according to market research firm In-Stat. The type of flash used in solid-state drives is referred to as NAND flash.

"You're starting from quite a small base. Back in 2006, you're in the tens of millions (of dollars) kind of a number. By … Read more

Updated at 7:15 p.m. PST with additional information from earnings conference call.

Memory chipmaker Micron Technology posted its eighth-straight loss as it was hit by a steep drop-off in chip prices caused by global oversupply.

In the quarter ended December 4, 2008, the Boise, Idaho company posted a net loss of $706 million or 91 cents per diluted share, on net sales of $1.4 billion, down 8.7 percent. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg had forecast a loss of 45 cents a share.

The 2009 fiscal first quarter results include a $369 million write-down of memory chip products, … Read more