Double delight for PC memory makers
Published: 14 Apr 2004 11:15 BST
In addition, the market has been notoriously hard to forecast, as demand fluctuations often clash with ebbs and flows in supply.
For now, though, industry executives are remaining cautiously upbeat.
"We're not wrapping dollar bills around memory any more. The price has been stable," said Dan Donabedian, president of Elpida's US subsidiary. "But we can't (afford to) lose money on this one."
What is DDR2?
DDR stands for double data rate, and it has become the standard PC memory over the past couple years. DDR now tops out at 400MHz; DDR2 will debut at 533MHz and climb to 667MHz before the end of the year. Higher speeds lead to greater data throughput, a key driver of PC performance.
DDR2 is also easy on energy. Statistics from Samsung project that DDR2 running at 533MHz uses 65 percent less power than 400MHz DDR does. While this will help conserve notebook batteries, it will also cut back on heat dissipation in desktops and servers, an increasing problem, as processor speeds climb.
The exact performance boost is difficult to quantify, "but suffice it to say that as DDR2 speeds increase from 533MHz to 800MHz, the performance difference (is) notable," said Richard Gordon, research vice president for emerging technologies and semiconductors at Gartner.
The ability to integrate DDR2 into computers will come after Intel and others release chipsets that can connect to it. Grantsdale and other early DDR2 chipsets will likely appear in May, with PCs that use the chips appearing later in the year.
"The server market is going to come up first, followed by the desktop, although one large customer is ramping up desktops before servers," Donabedian said.
The fab five
The difficult part for manufacturers will lie in digesting all the back-end changes in their fabrication facilities, or fabs. Jim Elliot, senior product marketing manager of DRAM at Samsung, has identified five different elements, an unusually high number.
Most large manufacturers will open up new 300-millimetre manufacturing facilities to produce DDR2. These same manufacturers will also shift from making chips on the 130-nanometer manufacturing process to 110 nanometres and below. Typically, opening up new factories and shifting to a new process is a difficult endeavour for semiconductor manufacturers, because they have to wrestle with unpredictable or unknown problems. Mistakes can subsequently lead to pauses in production.
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