With twenty percent of their next year’s NAND inventory now going in the trash, it appears that worldwide NAND availability next year will sink by 7.5%… and with the increasing popularity of NAND-based gadgets like the iPad and the MacBook Air, it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
No wonder that many still believe Obaba proposal was raising taxes...
stupid is as stupid does - 2 years passed and Obaba still could not make it clear - oh well - there are a lot of dummies out there
0.07 second power outage drops worldwide NAND supplies by 7.5%
Dec. 13, 2010 (10:15 am) By: John Brownlee
0.07 seconds. That split second of time is so minuscule that the human brain scarcely could register it, yet the power going out at a Toshiba manufacturing plant might be all that it takes to sink the world’s flash memory supply by 20% for the next year… and send the price of your next smartphone or tablet skyrocketing.
The power outage happened at a Toshiba factory in Japan specializing in the production of NAND flash memory, which is the sort of chip that is used in Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as well as most other smartphones, digicams, PMPs and tablets.
NAND flash chips are fabricated on silicon wafers about the size of dinner plates and can take between eight to twelve weeks to process. If the power goes out at any point in that time frame, the entire batch can be destroyed, and even though the power outage in question was only 0.07 seconds, it still was the equivalent of yanking the cord out of the wall: there’s no way to plug it back in quick enough that the system won’t reboot.
It’s a big deal. Toshiba is responsible for 35.4% of the world’s NAND flash memory, second only to Samsung. With twenty percent of their next year’s NAND inventory now going in the trash, it appears that worldwide NAND availability next year will sink by 7.5%… and with the increasing popularity of NAND-based gadgets like the iPad and the MacBook Air, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. |
