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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pam who wrote (38169)	12/10/2007 10:52:56 AM
From: Pam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

This link doesn't work but has what you quoted- edn.com; Now the link is working and here's the article- End of memory relationship may impact handsets M-Systems and Samsung's parting of ways may have huge implications for high-end cell phones. By Michael Santarini, Senior Editor -- EDN, 4/11/2006 The NOR-flash vendors probably slept well for the first time in a long time last weekend after NAND vendor M-Systems quite conspicuously announced last Thursday that it is terminating its licensing deal with Samsung. It's potentially huge news, with big implications for the cell-phone market. M-Systems owns key memory patents and is a manufacturer of hybrid NAND devices, based on those patents, that allow handheld devices to boot from a hybrid NAND device, thus eliminating the pricey NOR. The company's hybrid devices have been displacing NOR devices at the high end, where NOR vendors usually make the most profit. M-Systems sells the devices under the name mDOC. The company claims its hybrid architecture has won spots in most of the top-of-the-line phones from something like six of the seven largest handset players. Originally, mDOC was a monolithic device that incorporated a controller, a small bit of SRAM, and NAND cells. To be more agile in the market and also to avoid being controlled by the capacity shortages of any one NAND vendor, the company moved the mDOC architecture to a multichip module, where the controller and SRAM are combined on one SOC, and the NAND—from whichever vendor offers the cheapest price at the highest capacity—resides on a second chip. But a few years ago, M-Systems cut a licensing agreement with Samsung to secure NAND supply. In exchange for capacity, Samsung got the right to manufacture its own hybrid device, OneNAND, which is a monolithic device based on the M-Systems patent portfolio. Samsung too has apparently seen some great success with the architecture; the company claimed last November to be shipping more than 3 million a month. Two days before M-Systems announced it was terminating the license, Samsung was still singing the praises of the architecture when it announced it was mass producing OneNAND in 70-nm silicon. The big selling point of hybrid devices is that they typically have greater data-storage capacity than NOR devices and are much less expensive. OneNAND, for example, comes in sizes up to 4 Gbits. The devices save space by eliminating the NOR device and boast much faster write speeds than NOR. For the user, that translates to faster saving of camera-phone snapshots, for example. For engineers, the devices present a bit more of an integration challenge than straight flash devices, however. To date Samsung has only used the M-Systems patent to develop a single-level-cell device, while M-Systems already has a multilevel-cell version. But the very quiet announcement from M-Systems last week could have huge implications in the high-end cell-phone market. Does it mean Samsung has to stop selling OneNAND? Does it mean M-Systems has to find another big NAND partner (it also uses Hynix and Toshiba as NAND suppliers)? Does it mean that high-end cell-phone vendors will go back to the older "boot from NOR" model instead of using hybrid devices? Are some of existing cell-phone architectures now in limbo? Will M-Systems sue Samsung if Samsung produces OneNAND without a license? Will cooler heads prevail? These issues have yet to play out. M-Systems refuses to comment on the matter beyond the release. Samsung also declined to comment. It's interesting to note that in the same week that M-Systems announced it was severing the licensing agreement with Samsung, Intel announced its first 1-Gbit NOR implemented in 65-nm silicon, which essentially allows it to service the low-end of the high-end handheld market. In other words, there may be a ray of light for bleeding-edge NOR after all. Enjoy some sleep while it lasts, boys. For additional background, see "NAND versus NOR: Which flash is best for bootin' your next system?"