Hi, billwot. Well, to start with, the websites of Racom, Rohm, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Berjaya are not helpful. Rohm says they will upgrade sometime. I have not checked Intag for awhile.
Fujitsu has a project with RMTR to produce a 1 Meg FRAM, but that will take 'til the end of the year, and, if history is a guide, somewhat longer. So this alliance may mean using Racom products made by Rohm at the moment. It would appear that a call to Racom is needed to ask a few questions. As far as 'systems' are concerned, Racom has an alliance with Perot Systems which should allow them to compete with the likes of Cubic Corp, which is the major transportation automation player at the moment. However, Fujitsu should be a bigger partner, if they are serious.
As far as the potential is concerned, the stream of deals indicates that quite a few observers, especially in Japan, think that FRAM is ideal for portable applications such as smart cards. RMTR owns a fair chunk of RCOM, and one can hope that will be worth something -- Gumport, at Lehman, once estimated about $2/share. However, if you look up news about smart cards, there are a lot of players...so RCOM needs all the alliances it can make.
So we come back to the current situation, which is that Hitachi has not yet quite finished developing 256K FRAM...Rohm is said to be sending out samples of FRAM, but so far I don't know anything about that aspect...so, one has to call RCOM.
If FRAM is a practical idea in the sense of economic production at a reasonable density, someone is going to make a bundle, since it can attack the rapidly growing non-volatile memory market.
Regards, Logan |
