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Technology Stocks : Micron Only Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (50730)	3/13/2000 12:30:00 PM
From: DJBEINO	Respond to of 53903

Diversification rewrites DRAM maxims By Brian Fuller EE Times (03/07/00, 1:35 p.m. EST) PHOENIX ? The large number of DRAM flavors has led to a handful of suppliers able to sustain the intense capital and R&D demands of serving a few high-volume markets, while the rest of the old-line memory vendors fight for the peanuts of niche businesses. That was the take of panel members at Semico Research's annual Semico Summit here on Monday (March 6). "DRAM is no long a one-size-fits-all commodity," said Dean Klein, vice president of the Integrated Products Group at Micron Technology Inc. "Memory is likely to become . . . a strategic component of each design." Klein, whose company surged to the lead in the DRAM market since it acquired Texas Instruments Inc.'s memory business, said it will take enormous resources to tackle any large market going forward. But second-tier companies can't handle those financial resources or won't handle them because the DRAM depression of the past two years has left them shell-shocked, he said. Keith McDonald, president of Smart Modular Technologies Inc. (Fremont, Calif.), took a slightly different tack on the same issue. A module maker can only support so many variations of increasingly varied DRAM architectures and hope to make money, he said. In the past, four module types accounted for 80 percent of the PC100 memory business. But the market now also includes 200-MHz and 266-MHz version of double-data-rate Rambus DRAMs, and various SDRAM flavors, which leaves a module maker with at least 22 variations to possibly sell. The market is tricky "when you're in 5 percent supply-demand ratio in DRAMs," McDonald said. But trying to forecast supply and demand for three different DRAM types is almost impossible, he said. For the first time over the past few years, panelists acknowledged that pricing isn't the only thing that keeps them awake ? although recent memory pricing has been shaky at best. Semico researchers estimate the worldwide DRAM module market this year will reach $27.7 billion and escalate to $41.4 billion next year ? just a fraction over the industry's record high of $40.8 billion in 1995. Apart from pricing, technology issues are now a concern, participants said. "Some applications will require blazing logic speed, others chunks of memory," said Micron's Klein. And embedded memory will always find a home, for instance, in ink-jet printers with 60-MHz processors and a need for 2 Mbytes of memory, he said. "You can integrate a small piece of DRAM in this application. It's a perfect marriage. You can save a lot of cost in that equation." Diversification dilemma DRAM diversification doesn't bode well for the push to 300-mm wafers, which were once forecast to ramp up in 1999 and are now just starting to garner semiconductor-gear production capability. "This [diversification] does not look good on a 300-mm line right now," Klein said. "We can continue on eight-inch wafers by improving geometries, shrinking dice, squeezing the equipment and really not flood the market with any particular part type." Panelists also agreed that there is a place for Rambus DRAMs in the drive for differentiated products. "Today you take jumps at 64 megs at a clip," said Smart Modular's McDonald. "When you go forward, Rambus allows you granularity in 32-meg increments." He noted that Sony's Playstation ? first seen as a great game platform and now seen in its latest iteration as the consumer's TV-based entry to the Web ? takes two pieces of Rambus DRAM. "You'd have to use 8-to-16 pieces of other DRAMs in that system. Is Rambus a premium? I say no because you have fewer components," he said. eet.com

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (50730)	3/13/2000 12:31:00 PM
From: TREND1	Respond to of 53903

Zeev As you know Hal gives the RISK when a signal is given. Right now Hal RISK numbers are too high. Larry Dudash

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (50730)	3/13/2000 2:23:00 PM
From: DJBEINO	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 53903

Micron Tech Shares Rise on Optimism for Higher Chip Prices 3/13/00 10:38:00 AM Source: Bloomberg News Boise, Idaho, March 13 (Bloomberg) -- Shares of Micron Technology Inc., the biggest U.S. maker of computer-memory chips, rose as much as 7.9 percent on optimism that prices for its products will rebound as demand begins to increase next month. Micron rose 7 3/4 to 114 1/8 in early afternoon trading of 3.79 million shares. Earlier, it touched a record 114 3/4. The stock has gained 47 percent since Feb. 28 on enthusiasm for rising prices for dynamic random access memories, the main memory chips in personal computers. The spot price today for a 64-megabyte computer-memory chip was about $5.22, down half a percent from Friday, though still up from a low of about $5 last month, Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Eric Ross said. Investors are buying Micron shares in hopes that rising demand for PCs will push up memory prices, Ross and other analysts said. 'There's an underlying hope for strength in prices,' said Thomas Smith, a Standard & Poor's Equity Group analyst who rates Micron an 'outperform.' 'Things have looked better in the past couple weeks. I suspect that trend is continuing.' Ross said demand for DRAM chips will accelerate in April and May. He said DRAM sales will almost double this year from last year, when sales rose 105 percent on a strong back-to-school season. That's well above the average 80 percent growth in the last few years. Chip prices remain about half of what they were in December, when they rose to about $10. Memory prices rise and fall most when the industry tries to either add more manufacturing capacity to meet surging demand or rein in production to cope with falling sales. Following a two-year slump, prices started rising in the middle of last year as PC makers began shipping more memory in each machine and production slowed. 'The worst is behind us,' said Ross, who rates Boise, Idaho- based Micron a 'buy.' Infineon Micron may be getting a boost from enthusiasm for Germany's Infineon AG, Europe's third-largest chipmaker. Josephthal & Co. analyst Lawrence Borgman said Infineon operates largely in the DRAM market. Siemens AG sold about 174 million shares, or about 29 percent, of Infineon to the public. Investors sought 33 times the number of shares offered, leaving it heavily oversubscribed, and shares more than doubled to 70.15 euros in Germany in the stock's first day of trading today. 'With the success of the Infineon offering, investors are saying if that's the way to treat Infineon, maybe we ought to take another look at Micron,' Borgman said.