Hon Hai gets into thick of RIMM-connector competition
By Richard Richtmyer
Electronic Buyers' News
(06/15/99, 01:49:33 PM EDT)
Adding its name to the growing list of connector suppliers offering parts that support the Direct Rambus DRAM architecture, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd. is developing connectors for Rambus in-line memory modules (RIMMs).
Under an agreement signed with Rambus Inc., Mountain View, Calif., Taiwan-based Hon Hai will develop the RIMM connectors, as well as RIMM-continuity modules and module heat spreaders for Rambus memory systems.
“With the addition of Hon Hai, the availability of Rambus infrastructure components worldwide gets a big boost,” said Subodh Toprani, general manager and vice president of Rambus' industry-enabling division. “OEMs, no matter where they are, now have another source of supply for connectors.”
Hon Hai, which operates in the United States as Foxconn International Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., last year ranked 11th in worldwide connector sales and first in sales in the Pacific Rim, according to Fleck Research Inc., Santa Ana, Calif. Hon Hai lists each of the top 10 PC and motherboard manufacturers among its customers, including Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Intel. About 70% of Hon Hai's 1998 connector sales of $632.5 million were for PCs.
With its agreement to manufacture the RIMM connectors, Hon Hai becomes the fourth major connector supplier preparing for a strong surge in demand for parts compliant with Rambus' memory-bus specifications. AMP, FCI Electronics Worldwide, and Molex have also ramped up into high-volume production after developing the products for about a year.
So far, the parts from AMP and Molex have passed Rambus' validation testing, which is designed to show whether they meet the impedance requirements that enable transmission of data on the 800-MHz Direct DRAM interface, with FCI expected to follow shortly.
Hon Hai, which had been developing its RIMM connectors for several months prior to signing the agreement with Rambus, expects to have its parts in full compliance with Rambus specifications before the end of the summer, and to be shipping the parts in volume by early fall, according to Jeff Pan, the company's RIMM connector product manager.
“Our plan is to ramp up and support about 300,000 per month by the end of July, and probably double that by the end of August,” Pan said. “We expect, probably starting in September, that the volume will be up much more significantly. After we pass the validation testing, I believe we need about two months to allow our customers to try them out and to use our products to test their designs.”
Once the company completes the validation process, it plans to shift the bulk of its RIMM-connector manufacturing to its facilities in China, Pan said.
Neither Hon Hai nor any of the other suppliers currently tooling up for mass production of RIMM connectors have expressed concerns or backed off from manufacturing plans because of Intel Corp.'s delayed launch of its Camino chipset. AMP, for example, already has the capacity in place to produce 800,000 parts per month, and plans to boost that to 1.5 million per month by September.
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