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

To: Woerns who wrote (2950)	1/6/2008 9:05:47 PM
From: Pam	Respond to of 4590

@PAM Thanks for enriching our discussion! SPSN says its NVM does not compete with NAND but rather with DRAM. The eclipse MCP is supposed to reduce the amount of embedded DRAM or possibly not needing any DRAM at all (in an optimistic case, basically we don't know if it's possible). In addition to reducing the costs of the MCP (at least if the amount of needed storage is not too big) the topic of power consumption comes into play. Thanks and you are welcome! I do not think DRAM can be completely eliminated. If you understand how cell phones, PDAs etc. work, a small amount of LPDRAM will be needed in most appliances with data storage. DRAM, NOR and NAND are three very different types of memory for different purposes. They all have their own advantages and disadvantages. What is happening is NAND requirements in MBs are growing but the other two are not really needed beyond a small density in CE devices. Historically, DRAM has been most expensive and then NOR and finally NAND being the cheapest. What is happening is that DRAM prices are coming down rapidly and NAND is attacking NOR's core business and that is the biggest thorn in Spansion's foot! So the advantage of lowering the BOM with less amount of DRAM using Eclipse products may not be as big an advantage with falling DRAM prices. If you remember, SSTI in NOR business, they were able to concentrate on low-density products and survived for a while while Spansion, Intel and STM were killing each other in the higher density NOR markets. I think, that's where Spansion has best chances but with their core business under attack from cheaper NAND based solutions they have a daunting task and with the overcapacity in NOR there just no pricing power :-( I don't have a link but I heard that several manufactures are working on handsets fed with normal batteries instead of rechargeable batteries. (IMO an environment killer btw since nearly 100% of batteries end in the garbage dump instead of being cleaned up regularly.) These mobile phones are supposed to be low-end for the emerging markets so there won't be any need for large NAND amounts to store data. But a low power consumption of the whole device is essential, IMO it is the market enabler. I am not as knowledgeable about the battery issues so can't really comment there. It is true that most phones are not using a lot of NAND today but that is changing fast and some countries have and are skipping generations of cell phones. Last year 400mm(?) cell phones had slots! If you look at history, storage requirements will go up with time and that's where the action will be. Spansion may have a very short window to play these fusion/MCP based solutions.