Micron beats subdued guidance on output cuts

Micron beats subdued guidance on output cuts
by Robert Maire on 06-26-2019 at 5:00 am

2020 capex likely down at least 20% vs 2019 DRAM & NAND price drops versus slowing capacity. Investors happy cause it could have been worse.

Micron reported $1.05 in Non-GAAP EPS beating street consensus of $0.79 by $0.26. While this looks like a big beat, we would remind investors that estimates for the quarter were about… Read More


TechInsights Gives Memory Update at IEDM18 DRAM and Emerging Memories

TechInsights Gives Memory Update at IEDM18 DRAM and Emerging Memories
by BHD on 04-17-2019 at 12:00 pm

On the Sunday evening at IEDM last year, TechInsights held a reception in which Arabinda Das and Jeongdong Choe gave presentations that attracted a roomful of conference attendees.

This is the second part of the review of Jeongdong’s talk, we covered NAND flash technology in the last post. Jeongdong is a Senior Technical… Read More


LithoVision 2019 – Semiconductor Technology Trends and their impact on Lithography

LithoVision 2019 – Semiconductor Technology Trends and their impact on Lithography
by Scotten Jones on 03-01-2019 at 12:00 pm

I was asked to present at Nikon’s LithoVision event again this year. LithoVision is held the day before the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference also in San Jose. The following is a write up of my talk.… Read More


2018 Semiconductor Year in Review

2018 Semiconductor Year in Review
by Scotten Jones on 01-04-2019 at 12:00 pm

Strong Overall Market Growth but a Slowdown Looms
After six years of single digit percentage growth in the overall semiconductor market, 2017 saw almost 22% growth and 2018 year-to-date is up roughly 17% (based on numbers published by the world semiconductor trade statistics). The big growth driver the last two years has been … Read More


Apple as Apex of chip industry portends weaker 2019

Apple as Apex of chip industry portends weaker 2019
by Robert Maire on 01-04-2019 at 7:00 am

On the first day of trading in the new year Apple just announced, after the close, that revenues will be lower than previously expected coming in at $84B versus the expected range of $89B to $93B and analyst estimates of the current quarter at $91.5B. Ugly….. The blame was laid squarely on China as slowing sales and trade tensions… Read More


CAPEX Cuts and Microns Memory Markdown

CAPEX Cuts and Microns Memory Markdown
by Robert Maire on 12-21-2018 at 7:00 am

For those who have been paying any attention to the semiconductor industry its no surprise that memory demand and therefore pricing is down from its peak earlier in the year. Its not getting better any time fast.

After several strong years of demand and pricing, which was followed by enormous CAPEX spending we are seeing the standard… Read More


Architecture for Machine Learning Applications at the Edge

Architecture for Machine Learning Applications at the Edge
by Tom Dillinger on 10-31-2018 at 2:01 pm

Machine learning applications in data centers (or “the cloud”) have pervasively changed our environment. Advances in speech recognition and natural language understanding have enabled personal assistants to augment our daily lifestyle. Image classification and object recognition techniques enrich our social media experience,… Read More


AMAT talks long term AI but short term is ugly

AMAT talks long term AI but short term is ugly
by Robert Maire on 07-15-2018 at 7:00 am

We attended Semicon West Monday and Tuesday, the annual show for the semi equipment industry. Its very clear from discussions with all our sources in the industry that confirm that Samsung has put the brakes on spending on memory and that message was reinforced by declines in their expected profitability due to weaker memory pricing.… Read More


Are memory makers colluding against China?

Are memory makers colluding against China?
by Robert Maire on 06-07-2018 at 12:00 pm

Maybe OMEC is the new OPEC? A bargaining chip in June trade show down?

China has started an apparent investigation into pricing of DRAM memory with Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix as targets. We find this somewhat coincidental given the current trade issues. Memory pricing has been unusually strong for a very long time. Much longer … Read More


Imec technology forum 2018 – the future of memory

Imec technology forum 2018 – the future of memory
by Scotten Jones on 06-05-2018 at 12:00 pm

At the Imec technology forum in Belgium Gouri Sankar Kar and Arnaud Furnemont presented memory and storage perspectives and I also got to interview Arnaud. Arnaud leads overall memory development at Imec and personally leads NAND and DNA research.

Memory research is focused on power, energy, speed and cost with energy and throughput… Read More