Memory Growth Reorients Toward NAND

By Alexander E. Braun, Senior Editor -- Semiconductor International, October 17, 2007

In a keynote address presented at the International Symposium on Semiconductor Manufacturing (ISSM), held in Santa Clara, Calif., yesterday, Mark Durcan, president and COO of Micron Technology (Boise, Idaho), indicated that as applications have grown, the memory industry at large needs to change the way it optimizes its business. “We must have scale,” he said. “The successful memory manufacturer will be both in the NAND and DRAM business at least, and must be prepared by investing resources to innovate both in the technology and the product fronts.” Durcan added that this had to be followed by execution, by which he meant a focus on costs, technology and manufacturing, to be able to drive a strong and aggressive time-to-market program.

Listen to the full interview (Runtime: 3:39)

Mark Durcan, president and COO of Micron Technology

Durcan noted that the memory market is changing. “There has been a reset in the rate of growth for memory bits; DRAM in particular,” he said. “It has gone roughly from a 75% to about a 40% range. Although we think that there is ongoing growth and that so long as supply is in line with that growth it can still be a good business, I do not believe that it is sufficient to drive the scale that we need.”

The future for memory appears to be shifting from DRAM toward NAND, according to Durcan, who said that Micron is very excited about solid-state storage because of the significant growth that is taking place in this sector. “We’re also looking for a strong transition for more storage in the computing space,” he said. “We find the application of NAND flash in network caching and enterprise storage of particular interest and importance to us.” Durcan concluded by pointing out that he expects this considerable growth in NAND applications to continue in the future. “This growth will not be driven only by the rapid reduction in cost per bit, but also by the differentiated performance and power consumption that the technology offers.

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