The author has witnessed the memory industry for 20 years, and through a large amount of data and stories, it has described the memory market for 50 years.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Golden Jet” (ID: Jin-jiefan), author Jin Jiewei.
(“Storage Story” was written a year and a half ago, 20,000 words are too embarrassing, so delete half of the time to valuable friends)
Foreword
On May 1, 2006, German semiconductor giant Infineon split the memory division on the New York Stock Exchange, and the stock code was called Qi. The official said that Qi has two meanings, one is Chinese “qi”, which represents the energy flow (Energy Flow); the other is its pronunciation, pronounced Key, which means the key to open the world.
But this philosophical name does not bring good luck.
This company is called Qimonda. Few people know this company today, because she only lived for three years, and she fell to the ground from the world’s second largest memory company.
(Infineon announces the spin-off of Qimonda, two CEOs holding 12-inch wafers)
Infineon was the spin-off of Siemens Semiconductor in 1999. The first CEO was Ulrich Schumacher, who was only 41 years old. The adventurous Schumacher took the lead in investing 1.1 billion euros in the memory industry to invest in a 12-inch fab, enabling Infineon to catch up with Micron and Hynix in the early 2000s.
Unfortunately, in 2004 Schumacher was forced to leave because of a strange bribery storm (more on this later). Since then, the German company has become cautious and destined to be out of the game four years later.
In contrast, Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron, who is younger, more adventurous and who loves to play airplanes, seized the opportunity to stay in the top and bottom until 2012.
1999 is a big change in the memory world:
-Korean Hyundai Semiconductor ranked third in the worldThe fifth place LG Semiconductor;
-Hitachi and NEC merged their memory division to produce Elpida;
-IBM withdraws from Dominion, a joint venture with Toshiba, to exit the memory business;
-Micron, which just completed the acquisition of Texas Instruments’ memory division, also entered the mainland market;
-The 921 earthquake in Taiwan caused three times of memory in Zhongguancun due to loss of production line, which is unimaginable today.
My collection of Siemens antique memory
Why are the various electronics giants divesting their own memory business? Because the price of memory fluctuates greatly, and often it is more profitable. Listed parent companies and investors may not like to lose money for a while.
Why does the memory price fluctuate? Why aren’t other chips like this?
Simply, the memory chip is classified as a commodity, similar to a commodity, and is a general-purpose raw material. The price is determined by supply and demand.
Memory is the oil of the electronics industry, and almost every product needs it.
1960-70s
IBM’s Robert H.Dennard is recognized as the father of DRAM, he designed the concept of MOS capacitor storage refresh. Fairchild’s earliest mass-produced 256-bit memory can only store dozens of letters. After several backbones were “defective” from Fairchild, the i1103 produced by Intel in 1970 was an epoch-making DRAM, which reduced the storage per bit to 1 cent.
Intel’s first bucket of gold i1103 1kb memory chip
The DRAM overlord in the first half of the 1970s was Intel, but the second half belonged to Mostek. The company was founded by an engineer at Texas Semiconductor Texas Instruments (TI), relying on 4kb and 16kb DRAM, Mostek