GLG News by Semiconductor Testing Experts

The recent price drops in the DRAM market (and NAND) is an alarming issue.Nobody knows where it will stop. Recent drops in Micron profitability and Hynix rising as number 2 vendor, could be a sign of price war where everything goes...and nobody wins.

The article discusses the increase demand of Apple to NAND memory chips. Based on the increase demand for iPod and the upcoming iPhone Apple needs all the NAND chips it can get his hand on, Samsung and Hynix will be the main beneficiaries of that.

The PC Market has slowed down. Intel's weak Q2 sales revenue guidance confirms this.Intel did a good job of cost cutting and making yield improvements, but not as good a job in booking business so far this year.PC Bookings were pretty weak in Q1; this negatively impacted Intel.Better bookings will occur...

The use of stacked die in a single chip will drive an increase in demand for known good die, which in turn will increase the focus on test at the probe stage.  This will change the accepted strategy in non-memory devices of a crude test to prevent packaging bad die into one of performance test...

BIST (built in self test) is an important tool as part of an overall test suite, but today is largely a commodity that economically cannot stand alone as a product.  Logicvision has tied its fortunes to BIST, and cannot compete with the larger EDA companies that provide BIST as part of their integrated...

PCM is the most likely next-generation nonvolatile memory after Flash PCM may open up new applications with faster speed and potentially better scalability

The use of stacked die in a single chip will drive an increase in demand for known good die, which in turn will increase the focus on test at the probe stage.  This will change the accepted strategy in non-memory devices of a crude test to prevent packaging bad die into one of performance test...

Keith Barnes expounds on the advantages of the single, scalable platform, but in talking about how Verigy continues to drive down the cost of test misses the key factor causing tester price compression.

Capacity in the foundries is going down for the last quarter.We need to watch this parameter very careful since it might be the first sign of a real slow down in semi activity.If the trend will continue for next quarter or 2 quarters things might get ugly for the industry.

"Old Fabs never die"... they always find new buyers. Recently few "used" Fabs were exchanging hands, selling of ZMD Fab to X-Fab is the latest in the trend. Looks like for old Fab there is always someone who would like to buy it for the right price...