Hitting their stride: Nonvolatile-memory upstarts draw near to established leaders

摘要

ONE NEXT GENERATION TECHNOLOGY IS FINALLY ON A LEADING-EDGE PROCESS, ANOTHER IS NEARING PRODUCTION AFTER YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT, AND A THIRD HAS ITS FIRST HIGH-VOLUME CUSTOMER. THE NONVOLATILE-MEMORY RACE HAS, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A LONG TIME, BECOME COMPETITIVE AGAIN. IT'S BEEN MORE THAN 15 YEARS Since fast-random-access NOR flash memory's initial I public unveiling by Intel in 1988. NOR quickly gobbled up all of the memory sockets that EPROM had previously serviced, despite that EPROM technology was more than a decade and a half more mature (Figure 1). Nowadays, NOR flash memory is big business; Semico analyst Jim Handy estimates this year's revenue at USD13.362 billion.