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Nothing to fear from Chinese DRAM

by on04 May 2015


It is vapourware for now

It looks like a homegrown Chinese DRAM industry is not going to happen for five years yet.

China has been hoping to step away from dependence on foreign DRAM with its own technology. However Inotera Memories and Nanya Technology both believe that it is unlikely China can develop home-grown DRAM technology within at least five years.

Digitimes reports that the two companies think China might be able to gain access to proprietary technologies through technology licensing, but building a certain scale of production capacity would still require a period of time.
That means China's impact on the memory industry would not be felt for another 2-3 years, the makers said.

Samsung Electronics, Micron Technology and SK Hynix are sitting on the key DRAM technology and under the current circumstances, none of the vendors should consider licensing their technologies to China.

The reason for this is that if they licence it, the Chinese would go flat out to create am oversupply of cheap chips.

The global DRAM industry just got out of a two-year downturn, and has begun to benefit from a healthier supply-demand dynamic, the makers said. The last thing it wants is to face off with cheap Chinese chips.

Nanya said that the company has no intention to set up a production base in China.

Nanya is also in the progress of transitioning to 20nm process technology, enhancing its low-power DRAM technology portfolio. Nanya is looking to enter volume production of 20nm chips in the second half of 2017, and build additional LPDDR4 and DDR4 product lines.

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