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Politics : RAMTRONIAN's Cache Inn

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To: NightOwl who wrote (14028)	7/29/2008 6:06:29 AM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (1) of 14464

Pricing Puzzle... RMTR plans to employ "forward pricing" to make the 4Mb units from TI a competitive factor at $10-$12 in commercial quantities... down from the $17-$25 ($55/unit on ebay) initial price levels. Not that there is any viable option to do otherwise. But what would happen to those $10-12 prices and the 53% margins they nourish if, oh... say Samsung... or Toshiba/Sandisk... were to start pumping 8Mb FRAM units to serve the SSD cache/controller market? Hmmm... 53% of $11? ...Or 2% of $9... $7... $5? Time waits for no commodity semi-conductor man. The foregoing is precisely why TXN got out of the commodity DRAM manufacturing business... and to date I have seen nothing to suggest that they will reenter the fight on behalf Ramtron... F-RAM... or anything else. Fortunately there is precious little to suggest that the likes of Samsung or Toshiba/Sandisk is about to start ramping mass quantities of 4Mb FRAM into the SSD or any other market... soon. Perhaps even more fortunate are the sordid "technical difficulties" which have befallen the increasingly impoverished Numonyx and Freescale "spin" offs. But I digress... Suffice to say that lady fortune has granted our little "hero" a brief honeymoon of monogamous monopoly in which to play the low density niche markets of non-volatile memory. But the risks are many and the rewards are nanometer thin for any semiconductor man who forgets that time is volatile... and honeymoons have the lowest cycle count of all. IMVOP... hey its cheap so back off... Ramtron's "honeymoon" is likely to come to a screeching halt by the time the BIG boys get past the 32nm process node. That's 2010 at the outside for those of you who haven't been paying attention. Message 24767382 Hopefully by then we will be able to find a few more patents relating to the development of FeNAND...FeNOR... Self-aligned PZT Quantum-dots... *something... anything with a future beyond 1T/1C NVmemory IP bearing the name of Ramtron as assignee... that has at least a shot at 100M+ cycles at DRAMesque bus speeds. Either that... or a hell of a lot more NV/analog/logic IP and* products bearing the Ramtron brand than we have now. 0\|0

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