Summary
Spansion's bankruptcy filing could indicate the beginning of the end of the high-density NOR flash market. This would force changes in design methodology at cell phone makers Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, Bird, and many others, and breed new chipset designs at companies like TI and Qualcomm. Numonyx, the NOR spin-off formed out of Intel and ST could find that its products' market would decline due to a lack of a viable alternate source.
Analysis
The following are excerpted from a free downloadable analysis of Spansion's recent troubles at www.Objective-Analysis.com :
"...several alternatives are available... One would simply be for the company’s debt to be restructured and business would continue as before. The most dramatic opposite stance would be for the company to be liquidated.... We see neither of these as likely."
"Objective Analysis believes that the asset that is most likely to be sold to the company’s advantage would be their intellectual property"
"Objective Analysis expects to see some very dramatic changes the NOR market over the long term. NOR could lose many of its high density markets to NAND/NOR combinations or NAND-alone designs. NOR would then take on the role of the low-density chip sold at a low price point. ... this is exactly the same process EEPROM followed."
