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Politics : RAMTRONIAN's Cache Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NightOwl who wrote (7522)	7/30/2000 2:35:12 AM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14464

One more spark for "MD" before my fires go out for the night. RMTR has a significant toe hold in the fab sector with Infineon and my favorite saying: "$200,000,000 worth of wafer starts in guaranteed capacity". However, it should be noted that in this commodity market that is not enough. DRDRAM will fail as a main memory product for the PC segment specifically because it is not a design which the industry will standardize on. It wouldn't matter if DRDRAM was the only flavor chip that Samsung produced. DRDRAM would not capture the desktop because it won't and can't also capture the mobile/laptop or server markets. This means that DRDRAM cannot be commoditized to the same degree that Fabs can and will commoditize SDRAM/DDR/DDR2/DDR3? There's a cap on the market segments that DRDRAM can expect to include in its target for sales. It therefore will always have a lower potential maximum production than the alternative SDRAM based parts. Since there cannot be as large a market for DRDRAM, a Fab company can never expect to spread its production costs over as many units as would be the case if DRDRAM could be sold into every segment. In RMTR's case, it faces the same problem for different reasons. ESDRAM is compatible with the standard bus architecture as well as DRDRAM's niche bus. Its core IP is independent of bus design. There is no "technical" cap on its potential market. However, it has yet to be adopted as an exclusive industry standard suitable for every segment as has been the case with FPM, EDO, and now SDRAM. But the reason in RMTR's case, with the advent of ESDRAM-lite anyway, is almost entirely political. By that I mean, it has to overcome the loathing of Fab companies to adopt a standard outside their "club" of cross licensed manufacturers. I would hope that RMTR's DRAM products serve a large enough and real enough need such that their design could become a standard without the lure of equity participation as in Infineon's case. It seems we need JEDEC adoption to do this. But if JEDEC goes with NEC as the standard for low latency DDR2, or tries to split the baby by making ESDRAM-Lite DDR2 a "superset" as they did with SDRAM and DDR; I would hope that RMTR would have a serious talk with Samsung about using an ESDRAM core on their new and improved version of DRDRAM. There might be a little "tension" shall we say between RMBS and companies like RMTR, but I see no reason why we can't play both ends against the middle in this poker game. Better still take the proposition for a ES-DRDRAM core to Infineon, MU and Samsung at the same time, and do a limited time exclusive deal with whoever is willing to guarantee production. We have Infineon on the DDR/SDRAM side. If JEDEC doesn't play fair, lets get a DRDRAM product out there and see if we can't force the issue on the best low latency IP in the market. Maybe a prayer for even faster CPU's and Front Side Bus designs wouldn't hurt. 0\|0