Samsung is doing GREAT with Rambus memory production !
March 19, 2001 09:03
Samsung Reports Robust Rambus Revenues
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 19, 2001--Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.
-- Samsung total RDRAM revenues to date exceed $1 billion
-- Samsung projects its RDRAM unit sales to increase four-fold in
2001
-- Samsung forecasts the total market for RDRAM to be 250 to 300
million units in 2001 and approximately 600 million units in
2002.
-- Samsung RDRAM market share to remain over 50%
Samsung Semiconductor, Inc., today announced that the company strategy of taking a leadership role in the Rambus RDRAM marketplace, where they have a market share of well over fifty percent, was rewarding the company with "robust revenues" despite the severe down-turn in the overall DRAM market. Sales of RDRAM high-speed memory devices, widely used in both high-end workstations and high-performance games machines, have been very strong since the product's inception and that total revenues to-date have exceeded $1 billion.
Samsung is forecasting that the RDRAM market will remain robust throughout the year as a result of the company's aggressive efforts to reduce the cost of these memory modules and the accelerating market acceptance of the Intel Pentium 4 and associated chip-sets, which closely couple the high-performance CPU to the fast RDRAM memory. Samsung has an on-going partnership with Intel Corporation, providing them with the majority of the RDRAM modules that they are bundling with their P4 platform motherboard kits. Samsung expects that its total RDRAM unit sales will increase four-fold in 2001, with its market share remaining over fifty percent. The total market for RDRAM in 2001 is forecast to be in the order of 300 million units, growing to approximately 600 million units in 2002.
Intel and Samsung have also announced implementation of a joint action plan, at Intel Development Forum, Spring 2001, to address the rapidly escalating demand for RDRAM. Under the terms of the plan, Intel will accelerate Samsung's RDRAM production investment schedule by supporting additional component test and qualifying capacity acquisitions (so-called back-end capacity.) Samsung will, in its turn, support Intel RDRAM requirements by immediately increasing the production throughput of RDRAM by 50%, to over 10 million units per month. Samsung is also planing to increase its RDRAM production capacity to approximately 20 million units per month during the second half of the year.
"RDRAM is a real business at Samsung, a really big business," said Mueez-Ud Deen, director of DRAM and graphics memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. "It is a business that is growing by leaps and bounds as the performance advantages of RDRAM become apparent to our customers."
Samsung is projecting that it will look forward to greatly accelerated sales of its RDRAM Memory Modules in 2002 as new, inherently low cost, versions of RDRAM become available. This will be made possible by the recently announced (January 17, 2001) development of a 0.17 micron design rule 256Mb RDRAM. Samsung's new RDRAM product, called 4i, has a 4-bank configuration instead of the 32 banks found in conventional RDRAM. The simplified architecture is the same as that used for synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM) chips and enables the designers to significantly reduce the size of the chip. The chip size is also reduced by an additional 5-percent compared to current RDRAM because of the process geometry change. These modifications are projected to lower overall production costs by approximately 20 percent. This new chip design, coupled with a move to lower cost packaging, is specifically intended to enable Samsung to aggressively reduce the cost of these high-performance memory modules. Samsung intends to pass-on these cost savings to its customers.
"Samsung leads by providing value solutions early to our customers," said Dieter Mackowiak, senior vice president sales and marketing at Samsung Semiconductor Inc., San Jose. "We will drive RDRAM technology as far and as fast as we can, continuing to provide our customers with the best value in memory products ahead of any of the competition."
Samsung plans to begin mass production of the new RDRAM in the second half of this year. Intel is concurrently developing a chip-set to support the new RDRAM. Armed with its new, less expensive RDRAM, Samsung will be able to expand its sales to the makers of mid-priced and low-end PCs and maintain its solid lead in the high-speed memory chip market.
Samsung has an on-going program of continuous technology improvement and is currently developing both faster and denser RDRAM modules to meet its customer's advanced system requirements.
About Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.
Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. Headquartered in Seoul, Korea, Samsung Electronics, with year 2000 sales revenue of US$30 billion, is a world leader in the electronics industry. It is the world's leader in DRAM memory, SRAM memory, and TFT-LCD display products for industrial, mobile and desktop computing applications. Samsung Electronics is also the world's fourth largest semiconductor company overall with a full line of semiconductor products including microprocessor and custom ASIC components. Maintaining its long and distinguished history of industry firsts, Samsung Electronics is the first company to develop a 4-Gigabit DRAM and has fully-functional prototypes of the next generation DDR-II DRAM. Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. is located in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit our website: usa.samsungsemi.com.
Rambus, RDRAM and the Rambus logo are registered trademarks of Rambus Inc. All trademarks and registration marks are the property of their respective corporations.
CONTACT: SAMSUNG SEMICONDUCTOR, INC.
Geoffrey Hughes, 408/544-4122
E-mail: ghughes@ssi.samsung.com
or
BW&A.
Vera Haire, 510/413-4994 ex:103
E-mail: vera@bwapr.com |
