To broaden their NAND product lines and bring future product and technology innovations to market that are designed to address challenges facing NAND technology over the next five years, Seoul, Korea-based memory giant Hynix Semiconductor Inc and the Intel Corp-STMicroelectronics flash memory company Numonyx BV announced today they have inked a five-year agreement to expand joint development programs for the fast-growing NAND flash memory segment.

Under the agreement, signed today Hynix and Numonyx are set to broaden the scope of their joint development efforts with an aim to deliver leading NAND memory technology and products as well as combine resources to accelerate the development of future NAND technologies and solutions, in addition to collaborating on mobile DRAM used in multi-chip packages for mobile phones.

With the manufacture of NAND memory getting more complex as the technology moves to smaller lithography nodes, Charge-Trap Device NAND is anticipated to replace the current mainstream Floating Gate NAND technology and Numonyx asserted that its experience in NOR Flash-based technology should contribute to this evolution. What is more, Numonyx said memory suppliers in the next five years will need a deeper understanding of device physics and overall memory system level solutions to overcome the challenges.

As such, effective utilization of Numonyx’s software expertise is expected to help in this effort and make a positive impact in market penetration and increasing market share for integrated NAND solutions such as microSD, eMMC, and SSD, the companies said.

The companies believe their synergies, combined with Numonyx’s 40 year legacy of solving difficult non-volatile memory challenges, and experience developing firmware, microcontroller and other system solutions will be key factors in helping to solve the limitations of the technology–moving NAND from raw silicon to systems.

In addition to the NAND collaboration, the companies said they also have a joint manufacturing initiative for the production of 300-mm low power mobile DRAM in their Chinese Wuxi joint venture. Mobile DRAM is most commonly stacked with non-volatile memory in multi-chip packages and is used by both companies in solutions for mobile devices. This collaboration on mobile DRAM is expected to allow both companies to ship more cost effective, low power multi-chip memory subsystems to customers requiring small form factors. And with Hynix’s April introduction of what it touts is the world’s fastest 1 Gb LPDDR2 product, Hynix is now the industry leader in mobile DRAM products in terms of product diversity, technology leadership, performance, and compatibility with SDR/DDR interfaces allowing for single chip solutions.

“To become successful in the rapidly evolving semiconductor industry, addressing technology issues jointly rather than independently reduces the risk by leveraging the best of both companies,” said Jong-Kap Kim, chairman and CEO of Hynix, in a statement.

Kim believes future joint technology development will be the key success factor in the alliance and the companies expect to make significant progress in developing memory solutions by focusing on the introduction of new products through systematic co-development in product, software and controller areas.

“Together, Hynix and Numonyx will develop a complete range of products on leading edge technologies that will enable both companies to win in the NAND segment. We’ll now have one of the broadest NAND design communities in the world and we look forward to continued success as we now work to develop new NAND memory solutions today and in the future,” he added.

Brian Harrison, president and CEO at Numonyx noted that success and growth in the NAND segment over the next five years will require a unique set of capabilities that Numonyx believes it can achieve with Hynix. “By combining our expert resources, engineering activities and Hynix’s absolute focus on driving cost, we believe we’ll have leading-edge technology, cost-effective and scalable manufacturing, industry leading memory system “know-how” and a history of bringing system-level NAND solutions to market very quickly. The complementary expertise from Hynix will certainly help strengthen our NAND position in the wireless segment in particular,” he concluded.

Interestingly, in addition to its interest in Numonyx, Intel has a separate NAND flash joint venture with Micron: IM Flash Technologies. On the surface, it may appear that Numonyx and IM Flash could compete, but Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy clarified, “IM Flash is a manufacturing company only with two customers, Micron and Intel. They don’t market, sell or otherwise make their product available to anyone else. Numonyx is an independent company. While they sell NAND their focus is on NOR and the segments of the market related to communications and embedded. There is some overlap between Intel and Numonyx but its limited to a small portion of the market.”

Meanwhile, in response to the Hynix-Numonyx news, C.J. Muse, semiconductor equipment and display technologies analyst at Lehman Brothers Equity Research said in a research note today that the JV on NAND is formalization/broadening of a pre-existing agreement between ST and Hynix to colloborate on NAND manufacture through their Wuxi manufacturing fab and should be a net mild positive for semiconductor equipment and consumers in the form of an additional NAND manufacturer.

Muse noted that this follows last month's agreement between Numonyx with Elpida to colloborate on NOR flash memory chips, and is the latest sign of the complexity and the capex requirements that manufacture of memory chips entail, which forces the combination of both R & D and production (capex) efforts. 

“Hynix, while having developed 3 bits/cell capability recently for NAND Flash manuf, nevertheless, was in our view, falling behind Toshiba and Samsung in NAND in technology and capex. In fact, our checks suggest that Hynix manufactured NAND suffered from yield issues at the 5X node. Similarly Numonyx had likely fallen slightly behind Spansion in NOR flash manuf costs, which was the first to go 300-mm manufacture of NOR chips,” Muse wrote.

 Still, he concluded, “Overall, this should be a net mild positive for semicaps, especially for [Lam Research] (strong etch as well as wet clean position at ST and strong etch position at Hynix), [Novellus] (strong position at Hynix) and [Form Factor] (supplies probe cards for NAND testing at Hynix and to Elpida) in the sense that a NOR+NAND flash player remains in the fray and potentially has a broader range of geographies from which finances could be raised, in the near term. However, it is not a scenario changer in our view as a) it is the formalization of a pre-existing colloboration (status-quo) and b) it is the JV of companies that have fallen slightly behind the leaders in NAND and in NOR. Nevertheless, one more customer in the NAND space means likely less negotiating power for leaders Samsung and Toshiba in discussion with semicaps, a factor mostly offset by less consolidation/more potential for overcapacity in NAND flash space.”

By: DocMemory
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