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

To: Pam who wrote (3078)	1/17/2008 5:49:09 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4590

Pam, What I was trying to figure out is how much could this capacity help in lowering their costs and improving GMs. If this capacity is just 20% of their total 200mm + 300mm capacity, it doesn't really help the bottom line a whole lot, but if it will be a significant portion of their total capacity, it will be harder for others to compete unless they also move their production to 300mm! I agree that as long as the percentage of 300mm output (using the latest technolog) is low, the benefits will remain low. But Spansion has couple of other things going for them vs. the rest of NOR field in addition to 300mm. These are (in order of importance): - Mirrorbit has advantage over Intel/STM floating gate MLC that amounts to approximately 1/2 of process node. So 200mm 65nm will be somewhat ahead of 200mm, 65nm Numonyx - 4 bits per cell will be ramping in the near future (sampling now for some applications): investor.spansion.com - Eclipse - delivering both data (NAND domain) and code (NOR domain) on a single die. The target market are mainstream phones of the near future that will have functionality similar to high end phones of today and yesterday (at lower price) - Ability to add logic on Mirrorbit die can enable some cost savings (Built in self test) but also open new markets as controllers or microprocessors can be placed on flash die. IMO, Spansion is on a trajectory that the rest of the NOR field cannot match, which gives me some confidence in that regard. But you brought up some good points about competition vs. NAND, BTW, something that I brought up as well some time ago, which is how much large scale helps in competitiveness. My question is: Suppose through combination of all of the factors combined, die size per bit of storage becomes equivalent between large scale NAND players and Spansion. How much does the large scale help in the eventual cost per bit, when the competition is kind of lopsided, like 10:1. What I am talking about the worst case scenario, when all that matters is cost per bit. If Spansion continues to execute on its roadmap, IMO, Spansion will be getting ever closer, or even surpass NAND players in die size per bit, but I am wondering how far away will Spansion continue to be in cost per bit due to manufacturing on much smaller scale... Joe