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Technology Stocks : Micron Only Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: eabDad who wrote (42344)	1/18/1999 8:21:00 AM
From: Land_Lubber	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 53903

Z, Really enjoy your posts (and Carl's too). Please keep up these kind of posts that provide us with much needed industry insight. Land_Lubber

To: eabDad who wrote (42344)	1/18/1999 2:24:00 PM
From: Ed Beers	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 53903

eabDad, I think that you are overlooking the fact that Micron is "the low cost producer". This is etched in the investors and is unrelated to process, feature size, and yield. Ed

To: eabDad who wrote (42344)	1/18/1999 9:03:00 PM
From: PAinvestor	Respond to of 53903

Thank you Z. I would agree with that market share figure, which I thought was what you were trying to say. Trench technology is proving very easy to shrink now that we are in DUV territory, in fact much more easily than stack capacitors. Almost the reverse of previous years. In fact Toshiba has caught up with MU in terms of shrink speed and die sizes are actually smaller. Hyundai are mass producing a 110mm2 64meg die at 0.25, and Hyundai 119mm2 well above Samsung. Lack of capex for LG and Hyundai have hobbled efforts for them to shrink to 0.22 and remain competitive. So I do not think they are as close now as were in late 1997 which was when Samsungs 100mm2 chip reached volume production. NEC are actually having problems with their chip shrink currently. In fact, they will probably announce a downward revision to their 1998 earnings in the next couple of weeks partly because of this, so I disagree with your assertion that they are starting to edge ahead. Fujitsu have decided to team up with Toshiba for their production of commodity DRAM, they have a good engineering team which will definitely bolster Toshiba's competitiveness. I would state also that Mitsubishi Electric actually have the least commitment to DRAM as they have been losing more money than Fujitsu and have no other profitable businesses to offset the losses such as flash and logic devices. DRAM will eventually become embedded (system-on-a-chip) so I would not read too much into Japanese announcement flip flops. They will all design higher density chips and make grand announcements of their technical capabilities, but they will not be put into mass-production. Rather, they will be used for R&D purposes, so do not expect bit supply growth to surge beyond that of demand.