Deteriorating economic conditions and decreased demand for 200 millimeter (mm) specialty DRAM products have created additional challenges for Micron Technology, Inc.'s Boise manufacturing operations. As a result, Micron announced today that it will phase out 200mm wafer manufacturing operations at the company's Boise facility. This action will reduce employment at Micron's Idaho sites by approximately 500 employees in the near term and as many as 2,000 positions by the end of the company's fiscal year. The company has sufficient manufacturing capacity remaining and does not expect any disruption in product supply required for customer needs.

Micron Technology and Nanya Technology Corporation, today announced that they have jointly developed low-power DDR2 (LPDDR2) DRAM technology for mobile and consumer applications with initial die densities up to 1Gb. Developed through the companies' DRAM joint development program (JDP), the LPDDR2 is designed to operate at 1.2-volts, providing as much as a 50-percent power reduction when compared to LPDDR1.
"LPDDR2 DRAM is important for the design of today's mobile applications, prolonging a device's battery life with its low-power consumption and improvement of overall system performance compared to low-power DDR1," said John Schreck, vice president of DRAM design at Micron. "Development of this high-performing LPDDR2 is credit to the swift progress in technology design that we have achieved through our JDP with Nanya. We look forward to growing our relationship with Nanya, continuing to bring industry-leading DRAM design to our customer base."

Micron Technology today announced results of operations for the company's first quarter of fiscal 2009, which ended December 4, 2008. For the first quarter of fiscal 2009, the company posted a net loss of $706 million, or $0.91 per diluted share, on net sales of $1.4 billion. These results reflect a non-cash charge to cost of goods sold of $369 million to write down the value of work in process and finished goods inventories of memory products to their estimated market values and a benefit of $157 million from first quarter sales of products that were subject to
previous write-downs. In the first quarter of fiscal 2009, the company generated $359 million in cash flow from operating activities and ended the quarter with cash and investments of $1.0 billion.

Micron Technology today announced it has worked with Sun Microsystems to develop a new single-level cell (SLC) enterprise NAND technology that dramatically extends the lifespan of flash-based storage for enterprise applications. The result of the collaboration has yielded production devices capable of achieving one million write cycles, a milestone that will help prepare the industry for new uses in solid state storage set to come from Sun, Micron and others. The new technology delivers the highest write/erase cycling capability of any NAND technology available on the market.

Yes, the title says it right. I just saw a YouTube video taken from Micron' headquarters, where the company's Joe Jeddeloh demonstrates the rough power of solid state technology. During the footage he demonstrates a prototype of comething called Washington solid state drive mounted on a PCI-E card that delivers read speeds of over 1GB/sec. Now we all know that these drives won't come in a month time, but they show how good the SSD technology really is. Maybe, this experiment also gives a hint how desperately we need a new SATA standard, current SATA 3Gbps drives no matter conventional or SSD can output only 300MB/s in theory. Back to the video, there two SSD PCI-E cards are running on a 2GHz eight-core Xeon system. Benchmarks of this configuration show output of 200,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second). Although, you can't actually read these numbers because of the video's low resolution, Jeddeloh says that one PCI-E drive can read at around 800MB/sec, while a pair of cards can read at 1GB/sec. Micron claims that there's nothing special about the flash memory the drives use, in fact these are ordinary SLC (single level cell) drives. They're only "managed correctly." At the end of the video, Jeddeloh also shows a single 8x PCI-E card that features two SSDs on a single board, that he claims also offer "at least" 1GB/sec of bandwidth. Micron plans "wide availability of the product in 2010, but that its going to be targeted at enterprise customers first." For now this is only a quick look in the future. Watch the video over at Micron's Advanced Storage Blog.

Micron on Monday said to CNET that it would start mass-production of its long-awaited RealSSD C200 256GB solid state drives early next year. More specificaly, a Micron representative said that the company will start volume production in March 2009, and although both Micron and Intel have just unveiled 34nm memory technology, the 256GB SSDs won't utilize it. Using the new 34nm process will allow both companies to deliver drives with over 300GB of storage space, but that's another story plus these drives won't come out until the end of 2009. According to some information given before, the 2.5-inch Micron RealSSD C200 256GB SSDs will read data at 250MB/s and write at 100MB/s. The new SSDs will have a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface and will make use of MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash chips. Previously, Micron said the drives were to enter mass production in Q4 2008, but the chipmaker is slightly behind schedule and won't make it until next year.

Intel Corporation and Micron Technology Inc. today announced mass production of their jointly developed 34nm, 32 gigabit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory device. Developed and manufactured by the companies' NAND flash joint venture, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), the process technology is the most advanced process available on the market and enables the industry's only monolithic 32 Gb NAND chip that fits into a standard 48-lead thin small-outline package (TSOP). The companies are ahead of schedule with 34nm NAND production, expecting their Lehi facility to have transitioned more than 50 percent of its capacity to 34nm by year's end.

Micron Technology today announced that it is expanding its partnership with Nanya Technology Corporation and signing a definitive agreement to acquire Qimonda AG's 35.6 percent ownership stake in Inotera Memories, a leading Taiwanese DRAM memory manufacturer, for $400 million in cash. To help fund the purchase price, Micron has obtained $285 million in term loan financing commitments from strategic sources at favorable terms.

After reporting a $344 million fourth-quarter loss last week Micron today said it is going to reduce its global workforce by approximately 15 percent during the next two years. Most of the workforce cuts will occur in Boise.

The combination of declining customer demand and product oversupply in the marketplace has driven selling prices for NAND flash memory significantly below manufacturing costs,

Micron said in a statement.
As a result, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), a joint venture between Micron and Intel, will discontinue the supply of NAND flash memory from Micron's Boise facility. The NAND operation shutdown will reduce IMFT's NAND flash production by approximately 35,000 (200 millimeter) wafers per month, according to Micron. Production in the other two joint ownership NAND flash facilities in Lehi and Utah will continue operating at full speed for now.

Continuing to deliver innovative storage solutions for mobile and consumer applications, Micron Technology, Inc. today announced their latest e-MMC embedded devices. At 32GB, they are the highest densities available on the market today and are fully compliant with MMC standards. In addition, these newest e-MMC devices from Micron take advantage of the company's industry-leading 34nm MLC NAND process technology, and feature an extended temperature range (-40C to +85C) for automotive and industrial applications.

Considered by many as the memory perfectionists, Micron Technology, that's working closely with Intel these days in the field of solid state storage, NAND flash technologies, etc., has devised a drive series it calls RealSSD, the series is branched into consumer and enterprise segments, the P200 series are the enterprise offerings which are manufactured in a way that allows high uptime and MTBF to for mission-critical storage environments. The P200 uses Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND technology while RealSSD C200 series aimed at the consumer segment uses the much cheaper Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND technology.

What makes the RealSSD stand out is that the drives offer sequential read and write speed of a whopping 250MB/s, something that takes 4 ~ 6 member RAID 0 arrays using conventional drives to achieve. The C200 series are available in the 1.8" and 2.5" form-factors, the 1.8" drives come in capacities between 32GB and 128 GB while the larger drives offer capacities up to 256 GB. The drives use the 3 GB/s SATA II interface and the MLC-based C200 parts offer respectable write speeds of around 100 MB/s which is still high for its segment, with read speeds of around 250 MB/s. These drives are expected to arrive in Q4, 2008 under the Lexar brand.

Micron Technology today introduced its next-generation RealSSD solid state drives (SSDs) for enterprise computing and notebook applications. The new drives-the enterprise-class RealSSD P200 and the client-focused RealSSD C200-provide a dramatic improvement in capacity, power and performance for the applications they serve.

Lexar Media, a leading global provider of memory products for digital media, today announced immediate availability of Crucial Ballistix PC3-10600 (DDR3-1333MHz) and PC3-14400 (DDR3-1800MHz) high-performance memory modules. These new modules expand on the award-winning Crucial Ballistix DDR3-1600 and DDR3-2000MHz product offering. As part of its commitment to the PC enthusiast and gaming community, Lexar Media continually seeks to bring new memory offerings to market and enhance its product lines.

With announcements coming in from of rolling out Solid State Drives (SSD) and that it would become a prominent player in the SSD business, Seagate is still in requirement of trade relationships with a NAND Flash manufacturer, add to that it doesn't have production facilities of its own.

This has gotten analysts to speculate on where Seagate will source its chips from, a possibility being buying Intel's share of the Intel-Micron JV. Such a buy-out would set Seagate back by close to $1 bn. Another possibility would be to acquire SanDisk or Hynix (Hyundai) which focus on making entry-level solid state drives, but are a major players in the overall NAND flash market. If it will be SanDisk, Hynix or any other flash maker remains to be seen, but it wouldn't come as a surprise if Seagate announces the acquisition of a flash company soon.

With many economies under inflation and other factors influencing a weak demand, these are perhaps the worst days for several companies involved in manufacture, marketing and distribution of DRAM and related products. While on the surface, all the consumer can see is a falling market price, in reality it is a composed chaos.

DigiTimes reports a falling demand for DRAM in the Asia-Pacific region as the Chinese government cracks down on users of contraband DRAM products brought in from manufacturing states. The government crackdown began with the thousands of internet-shacks and the components (both hardware and software) they used. All this comes ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a 'purge drive'. As a result, thousands of internet-shacks have been closed, bans have been imposed on the use of contraband hardware, most of which consist of DRAM related hardware. China also brought about changes in their customs routines and procedures making it extremely complicated for importers, stepping up waiting queues, affecting markets and more importantly, dampening demand.

Today Intel Corporation and Micron Technology introduced the industry's first sub-40 nanometer (nm) NAND memory device, unveiling a 34nm 32 gigabit (Gb) multi-level cell chip. This process technology was jointly developed by Intel and Micron and manufactured by the companies' NAND flash joint venture, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT). It is the smallest NAND process geometry on the market. The 32 Gb NAND chip is the only monolithic device at this density that fits into a standard 48-lead thin small-outline package (TSOP), providing a cost-effective path to higher densities in existing applications. Shipments of customer samples begin in June and mass production is expected during the second half of this year calendar.

Micron Technology and Nanya Technology Corporation announced today that the two companies have signed an agreement to create MeiYa Technology Corporation, a new DRAM joint venture. The partnership will leverage both Micron and Nanya's manufacturing technology, strengths and experience. As part of the joint venture, a 200 millimeter (mm) Nanya manufacturing facility in Taiwan will be upgraded to industry-leading 300mm technology starting this year, with the facility coming online for production in 2009. In addition to MeiYa, the parties will jointly develop and share future technology.

It is estimated that memory consumes approximately 15% of power in data center server systems today, a figure which is expected to rise with the increased memory requirements needed for virtualization and multi-core data processors. Addressing this power challenge, Micron Technology is expanding its energy-efficient Aspen Memory module portfolio with the addition of 1Gb-based DDR3 modules operating at 1.35-volts as well as 2Gb-based DDR2 modules operating at 1.5-volts; providing the server industry with the lowest voltage DDR2 and DDR3 memory designs for reduced power consumption.

Micron Technology today announced that it is sampling 4GB DDR3 modules, designed using 2Gb components, to provide the industry's highest density DDR3 modules for notebook computers. High-density memory modules are becoming increasingly important for notebook computers as graphic-intensive operating systems and other content heavy applications continue to make their way onto the market. The fast speeds, high-density and low-power of Micron's portfolio of DDR3 modules - ranging in density from 512MBs to now 4 GBs - allow these systems and applications to perform more effectively and utilize power more efficiently.

Micron Technology, today launched Aptina Imaging, creating a separate division and new identity for its CMOS imaging business. Operating as an independent division within Micron allows Aptina to better focus on delivering high-quality imaging solutions to its global customer base.

Micron Technology, one of the world's leading providers of advanced semiconductor solutions, and Nanya Technology Corporation, a global leader in advanced memory semiconductors, jointly announced today that the two companies signed a memorandum of understanding to explore potential technology sharing, joint technology development and development of a new joint venture. A joint development program for DRAM development and design would be created and focus on sub-50 nanometer technologies. Definitive agreements are expected to be signed in the next few months.

Micron Technology today announced that it is sampling to customers and major enablers the industry's fastest 512 megabit (Mb) Mobile DRAM component, designed for the latest feature-rich mobile electronic devices. Mass production is expected in the second quarter of this year. With mobile applications adding increased computing and multimedia functionality, faster and better performing memory becomes paramount for optimizing performance.

Intel Corporation and Micron Technology today unveiled a high speed NAND flash memory technology that can greatly enhance the access and transfer of data in devices that use silicon for storage. The new technology - developed jointly by Intel and Micron and manufactured by the companies' NAND flash joint venture, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT) - is five times faster than conventional NAND, allowing data to be transferred in a fraction of the time for computing, video, photography and other computing applications.

Micron Technology, today announced production sampling of its new 1Gb DDR2 device fabricated on 68-nanometer (nm) DRAM process technology. The new process, coupled with Micron's 6F² technology, has enabled the world's smallest production 1Gb DDR2 memory with a die size of just 56mm². Mass production of its new 68nm 1Gb DDR2 products is expected to begin early next year, with DDR3 and other low-power DRAM products expected to follow in the second half of the year.

Charting new directions and opportunities for NAND-based storage, Micron Technology, today entered the growing solid state drive (SSD) market by announcing its RealSSD family of products. Offered in a range of form factors and densities, Micron's solid state drives are designed for computing, enterprise server and networking applications.