Market fragmentation puts more stress on DRAM makers
By Crista Souza, EBN
Mar 13, 2001 (11:09 AM)
URL: ebnews.com
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- While the last five years in the DRAM market have been pretty difficult, the next five may prove even more challenging, as the remaining handful of suppliers struggles to navigate a maze of memory architectures, processing technologies, and end applications, according to memory executives speaking Monday at Semico Research Corp.'s annual semiconductor summit. “Specialization will happen all over the DRAM supply base,” said Jan du Preez, president of Infineon Technologies North America Corp., San Jose. “Buyers will have to make procurement decisions much more strategically, and this will be one of the most compelling elements in the DRAM market in the next 12 months.”
Market fragmentation is a relatively new phenomenon to DRAM makers, which as late as last year were still dependent on the desktop PC market for over a third of their business. According to Phoenix-based Semico Research Corp., by 2005, 54% of DRAM consumption will be by a diverse set of communications and consumer electronics systems, with desktop computing dropping off to 12%.
Different suppliers, however, offered somewhat different solutions. Infineon, which is a large supplier of communications ICs, is positioning its DRAM manufacturing capability as an added value to give customers “one-stop shopping,” du Preez said. In addition, he said, the company's system-level experience prior to being spun out of Siemens AG, is an advantage not all of the top DRAM suppliers have.
Elpida Memory Inc., a pure-play DRAM supplier, is instead looking to its customers for more collaboration on specialty memories, as exemplified by industry-standards groups like JEDEC, AMI II, and ADT in the conventional DRAM area.
“I am proposing a joint effort between users and vendors in the application-specific memory market,” said Tokumasa Yasui, executive vice president of Elpida in Tokyo. “Users must be involved [in the creation of new memory technologies] if we are going to have success.”
The problem is, too few OEMs are proactive in setting standards, noted Sanjay Srivastava, chief executive of Denali Software Inc., a supplier of memory compilers. “At the recent JEDEC meeting in San Diego, I'm told not a single communications OEM was there. We've got to change that.” |
