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Infineon or Hynix, who holds #3 on DRAM?
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Tuesday, November 19, 2002
Germany's Infineon said today (Nov. 18) that it's investments in memory technology have paid off and that it is now the third largest producer of DRAM. But South Korean rival Hynix disputed those claims, saying it still has the bronze.
Since it has placed more emphasis on DRAMs over the last several years, Infineon has come from a lowly nine percent market share position to 14 percent today, making it the third largest DRAM producer, Infineon Technologies North America Corp. president Robert LeFort told an audience here at the Lehman Brothers investment conference. Samsung and Micron are the number one and number two DRAM producers.
LeFort credited the increase in marketshare to Infineon's moves to tap Taiwanese chip makers Nanya, Winbond and ProMOS for DRAM production. He also trumpeted Infineon's decision to develop a 300-mm wafer line in Dresden, Germany years before its competitors.
"We're now in quite high volume production of 300-mm wafers in Dresden and that's going along extremely well. And the majority of our manufacturing is now converted to .14-micron technology," he said.
However, Hynix vice president of worldwide marketing Farhad Tabrizi disputed suggestions that his company has been bumped from the number three spot.
"We believe Hynix is an industry leader and we are still number three in the market despite what our competitor said," Tabrizi told Lehman Brothers conference attendees in a presentation that immediately following LeFort's. "In October we produced over 80 million pieces of 128-meg equivalent. Please ask our competitor how many they produced and then rank us."
Tabrizi also downplayed the move to 300-mm wafer production lines, saying that the IC industry has been slow to adopt the larger wafers because they are too costly to produce. "The is issue is not just how many net die you get; you have to look at the overall cost," he said.
Still, Hynix will decide by the second half of next year when to make the transition 300-mm wafers that will use 0.09-micron design rules, Tabrizi said.
Both executives agreed that the prospects will improve next year for DRAM makers, due largely to the move to double-data rate devices.
"Weve been increasing shipments of DDR every month. We're sure as the DDR supply starts to increase the price will go down but we don't see it plummeting to the level that SDRAM has been," LeFort said.
Tabrizi said DDR devices should make up 85 percent of DRAM shipments next year. Most DDR devices shipped today run at 266-MHz and the next high volume runner will be 333-MHz. DDR-2, which will start at 400-MHz, will start shipping in the second half of 2003, followed by high volume production in 2004, he said.
Though there has been excess DRAM capacity for the past two years, Tabrizi predicted there will be moderate supply shortages in 2003. One reason is that DRAM vendors have invested little in new capacity over the last two years. Wintel should also lend DRAM vendors a hand: Microsoft's XP platform requires a minimum of 128-megabytes of main memory and Intel is expected to introduce a new dual-channel memory controller that requires two DRAM modules, he said.
"This year and last year we were in an oversupply, but not by much. In 2003, we expect a shortage, but not by much," Tabrizi said.
By: DocMemory
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