Will Elpida shake up NAND market?

SAN JOSE, Calif. - As reported, Japan's Elpida Memory Inc. on Thursday made its formal entry into the NAND flash market.

Will Elpida change the competitive NAND landscape? One analyst says no. The other says maybe.  

''Elpida’s entrance into the NAND market with the low density (4Gbit-1Gbit) 1.8V MirrorBit NAND  and Spansion coming out with 3V versions will have a very slight impact on the NAND market,'' said Alan Niebel, president of Web-Feet Research.

''These low density products either for wireless (Elpida) or the embedded/industrial (Spansion) markets will enable OEMs with legacy designs to have an alternative and on-going source of NAND,'' he said.

''Most of the other NAND vendors have migrated out of these ‘low’ densities and are developing TLC (3 bit/cell) to address low cost NAND at much higher densities (>16Gbit).  So, whether there are sufficient demand drivers to keep a couple of the NAND incumbents still manufacturing ‘low density’ NAND will determine how successful Elpida, Spansion and maybe the Taiwanese will be in this relatively small niche,'' he added.

Others had a different view. ''Elpida is the last DRAM maker to get into NAND (if we don't count companies who partner with larger DRAM makers).  This is important, since Objective Analysis predicts that future computers will include a NAND memory layer that will cause DRAM growth to slow down in all computing systems, from PCs to mainframes,'' said Jim Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis.

They are also getting into charge trapping earlier than most companies.  We believe that charge trapping will become the standard process for all flash at processes below 25nm.  Charge trapping is the simplest way to overcome the difficulties caused by the shrinking number of electrons per gate as processes shrink,'' Handy said.