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Technology Stocks : Spansion Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (2563)	11/15/2007 10:05:01 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4590

Ok, so there we have it, directly from hors's mouth, Spansion's NAND play (with a lengthy cautionary statement). Does anybody have a clue of what SONOS-like memory cell is? BTW, it does not seem to mention that this will be a Quad Bit. Maybe Spansion is seeking a higher performance level. It is a bit early to announce this, BTW, since the availability is planned to be early 2009. Maybe this could be Spansion's signal to investors wondering about Spansion's capacity expansion. Of course, Spansion has mentioned it several times in the past that the die size of MirrorBit will be very competitive in the future from the die size POV. If the NAND players do run into issues such as performance, yield and reliability as they move to 45nm and below on the floating gate, MLC, it could be a huge opening for Spansion to enter this, seemingly infinite and insatiable market. The road map seems to be: - Q4: 65nm Mirror Bit - 2008: 65nm Quad Bit - early 2009: 45nm Mirrorbit That leaves 45nm Quad Bit apparently (or hopefully) sometimes later in 2009. BTW, Spansion is still not targetting commodity removable market, only integrated. Joe

To: Joe NYC who wrote (2563)	11/15/2007 10:55:15 AM
From: bobs10	Respond to of 4590

you: Spansion Inc. (Nasdaq: SPSN - News), the world's largest pure-play provider of Flash memory solutions, today announced plans for the next generation of its successful data storage product family, the MirrorBit® ORNAND(TM) architecture. Leveraging Spansion's proprietary charge trapping storage technology, the new MirrorBit ORNAND2(TM) architecture will use a SONOS-like memory cell connected in a NAND memory array at 45-nanometers, featuring fast write performance with high packing density -- delivering the performance and cost advantages of NAND technology with the compelling cost structure of 300mm wafers. me: Sounds great, er, what's a SONOS-like memory cell?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (2563)	1/3/2008 8:34:31 AM
From: Rink	Respond to of 4590

Some more SONOS thoughts and details. Just an additional thought: Why did Spansion announce SONOS-based ORNAND and not SONOS-based Mirrorbit too? My probably premature guess is that SONOS might be used for NOR (currently Mirrorbit) too. Could it be that Spansion plans to Eclipse all NOR/ORNAND solutions to further simplify production and use, or is this too radical a thought? Below a couple more SONOS articles listed to provide some more detail about who is likely to use the technology, and what the material properties are: As posted by someone earlier I believe, Toshiba could well use SONOS somewhere between 32 and 10nm. Some additional tidbits: The new structure sandwiches a 1.2-nm silicon nanocrystals layer between the 1-nm thickness oxide films. Toshiba also increased the saved electrons amount by changing the nitride film from Si3N4 to Si9N10: eetimes.com Toshiba touts 3D SONOS flash raplacement: fabtech.org Macronix and Qimonda to jointly develop flash technologies such as Bandgap Engineered BE-SONOS: digitimes.com Shanghai Hua Hong NEC licensed 130nm SONOS from Cypress: eetimes.com Another explanation of SONOS including the below pic: Matching article: semiconductor.net SONOS cell ~ equal height as CMOS transistor. Contains explanation of why tunnel oxide and charge holding nitride layers can be so thin. Berkeley paper comparing Si3N4 with HfO2 (and ZrO2 and TiO2) for charge trapping layer in SONOS flash memory structures: eecs.berkeley.edu Regards, Rink