"Who are the other biggies?"
In flash? It depends on what sector of flash you are looking at. For NAND flash, you have Sandisk, Toshiba and Samsung. Apparently AMD dabbles in this area, and they will be trying to expand their presence in the future. For NOR flash, there are two sectors, low capacity and high capacity. For the high capacity players, you are looking at FASL (AMD/Fujitsu) and Intel. Micron has some products there and there are a couple of others, but the bulk of the market is those two. For low capacity flash, there are a number of players, I would guess Atmel and Microchip dominate, but there are a slew of other manufacturers. As far as I know, AMD doesn't have any products in the low capacity, but Intel might. This part is really cut throat, and the area that gets hit first when times get tough. This is the area where you will see companies drop out of the business, the others are pretty protected.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that flash is a uniform market, it is not. The big players don't really compete all that much, companies that are interesting in AMD flash will rarely consider Intel flash, and vice versa. And except for the low capacity market, they flash chips aren't interchangeable. So an OEM has to commit at design time instead of playing one supplier off another when they buy. |
