Hyundai readies Rambus push
By David Lammers
EE Times
(02/17/99, 3:56 p.m. EDT)
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Hyundai Electronics will begin to ship commercial quantities of the Direct Rambus DRAMs in May, starting at 64-Mbit and 72-Mbit densities, and move into full volume production by July. And following an industry trend that seeks to spread the cost of the chip-scale package and test over a larger memory array, Hyundai will move to a 128/144-Mbit density by October.
Mark Ellsbery, vice president of marketing, said Hyundai is using a 0.22-micron process to make a 64/72-Mbit part with a die size of 70 mm2, among the smallest of the Direct Rambus DRAMs on the market thus far. After the 128/144-Mbit part is introduced, Hyundai will come out with a dedicated 128-Mbit part with a slightly smaller die size.
"There will be a shortage of RDRAMs in 1999, but we think Hyundai's entry can go a pretty good way toward solving that problem eventually," said Ellsberry.
Hyundai's 256-Mbit RDRAM production will begin in the second quarter of next year, and account for slightly less than 10 percent of its product mix by the end of next year.
With its relatively late entry to the RDRAM market, Hyundai becomes the last of the major DRAM vendors to introduce RDRAM parts. Fujitsu Ltd., now among the second tier of DRAM vendors and moving away from the personal-computer sector, also has not established itself as an RDRAM vendor yet.
Hyundai was ambivalent about the Rambus technology, supporting the SL-DRAM technology. Hyundai decided to make a big RDRAM push four or five months ago, but it remains to be seen whether it can ramp production this year fast enough to put a dent in expected RDRAM shortages.
Sherry Garber, senior analyst at Semico Research (Phoenix), said, "Their announcement is significant because Hyundai had been a real holdout. Now they have a road map, but we will have to see if they can execute."
Semico predicts that it will take until the second half of next year before there is an adequate supply of RDRAMs. Garber said Intel, with its own ability to steeply ramp new generations of processors, may have overestimated the ability of the DRAM vendors to accomplish an equally steep ramp of a complicated new technology. Semico is predicting demand of 150million to 180 million 64-Mbit-equivalent DRAMs this year. About 12 million to 15 million systems based on the Pentium III processor will ship, with the average memory configuration ranging from 96 to 128 Mbytes, Garber said.
Hyundai Electronics and LG Semicon are expected to sign an agreement soon that, after two or three months of due diligence, would result in a merger. Hyundai Electronics had about 12 to 13 percent of the 1998 DRAM market and LG Semicon accounted for another 8 to 9 percent. Combined, the two companies might well exceed Samsung's 18 percent share, or the expected 15 percent share of Micron Technology, once it has digested its acquisition of the DRAM operation of Texas Instruments.
Sample quantities of the 64-Mbit RDRAM can be purchased for $26 each, and $29 for the 72-Mbit parts, which Hyundai calls the ECC (error correction and compensation) RDRAM. Hyundai expects the Rambus price premium to be as much as 80 percent in the third quarter of this year, compared with an SDRAM part of equivalent density. That premium will ease, quarter by quarter, but even by the third quarter of 2000 Hyundai expects a 40 percent price premium for the Rambus solution, dropping to a 30 percent premium.
Though that price premium is on a per-bit basis, memory engineers at this week's ISSCC conference suggested that a more appropriate metric in the multimedia age is the price of bandwidth, an area where Rambus is at least double the SDRAM bandwidth. |
