After memory giant Micron announced the discontinuation and potential sale of the Lexar brand back in June of this year, little additional information was provided as to the ultimate fate of Lexar. While there was some speculation that Seagate may pick up the brand to bolster its flash memory business, instead China based Longsys recently announced that had acquired the Lexar trademark and brand. Details of the acquisition were not provided at this time.

“We are very honored to acquire the Lexar brand,” said Huabo Cai, CEO of Longsys Electronics Limited. “Lexar has built a great brand name and our vision is to make it even greater. Existing customers can rest [...]

Crucial has recently announced the BX300 SSD, the latest update to the BX family of value oriented SSDs.

Available in capacities of 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB, the Crucial BX300 now packs the latest Micron 3D MLC NAND. Paired with the Silicon Motion SM2258 controller, the Crucial BX300 sports performance up to 555/530 MB/s sequential reads/writes and up to 95K/90K 4K random reads/writes for the top capacity. Write endurance is rated between 55 to 160TBW depending on capacity.

The Crucial BX300 is now available for $59.99 for the 120GB capacity, $89.99 for the 240GB capacity and $149.99 for the 480GB capacity. All drives come with a 3 year warranty.

DRAM and NAND prices have soared over the past year due to shortages and it looks like VRAM prices are following a similar trajectory as well. According to a recent article by Digitimes, VRAM price quotes have soared by 30.8% in August, leaping from $6.50 per package in July to $8.50 per package.

The price increase is due to RAM leading RAM manufacturers shifting production focus to memory for servers and smartphones. Samsung, which accounts for 55% of the worldwide VRAM supply, has more than doubled its server DRAM production from 12% to 27%. SK Hynix and Micron which account for the rest of the world’s VRAM production has significantly increased [...]

For FMS 2017, Samsung shared several new releases along with its SSD/NAND flash roadmap for the coming years. Among the new releases include Samsung’s 96-Layer QLC (Quad Level Cell) NAND and a few new enterprise SSDs.

64-Layer 3D V-NAND Transition

Samsung is already transitioning its entire line of products to utilize 4th Generation 64-layer 3D V-NAND. Their 64-Layer 3D V-NAND has been in mass production since June of this year and promises to be 30% faster, 30% more power efficient, and 20% more reliable than previous generation 48-layer 3D V-NAND.

This could potentially mean that Samsung’s successor to the 960 Pro and 960 [...]

Apple and Samsung aren’t exactly on the best terms, but sometimes you just have to set aside your differences to ensure that you’ll have enough NAND to produce your next generation of iPhones.

According to a recent report by Digitimes, Apple suppliers SK Hynix and Toshiba are both experiencing bad yields on their 3D NAND resulting in a shortfall of as much as 30%. In order to ensure an adequate supply of NAND, Apple has reportedly turned to Samsung which not only has relatively good 3D NAND yields, but also has the manufacturing capability to handle the increased demand.

Due to poor yields, global supply of NAND is expected to remain [...]

A mysterious “Genuine Intel CPU 0000” has appeared in SiSoft Sandra benchmark database, said to be likely an engineering sample of Intel’s upcoming Coffee Lake CPU.

The chip in question has six cores featuring a base clock of 3.1GHz and a turbo clock of 4.2GHz. It carries 256KB of L2 cache per core and 9MB of shared L3 cache. The chip reportedly has a die size of 149mm².

What tier this chip sits at is unknown, but considering the competitive pressure from AMD, it could very well slot into the consumer Intel Core i7-8700K. A quad-core variant will also be available but will be manufactured under a smaller, 126mm² die.

Coffee Lake [...]

A former TSMC Engineer was charged for stealing trade secrets to a competitor, according to a report by DigiTimes.

The former TSMC engineer, Hsu, was recently accused of stealing trade secrets on TSMC’s 28nm process to give to China-based Shanghai Huali Microelectronics (HLMC). TSMC’s 28nm process is a proven process which has been used in many chips including Apple SoCs, Qualcomm SoCs, Nvidia GPUs, AMD GPUs, and more. Hsu had recently taken a job at HLMC, but was arrested before he could start.

Of course this isn’t the first time this has occurred. A number of China-based memory chip makers have been aggressively poaching talent from [...]

According to a recent article from Digitimes, two of the world’s largest memory manufacturers may be having a hard time perfecting their sub-20nm DRAM processes. Micron is experiencing low yield rates transitioning into its 1xnm DRAM node, while Samsung had to recently recall a large batch of DRAM modules built on its 18nm process.

Last month, Micron announced that it was planning to spend $1 billion to upgrade its TaiChung fab to 1x nm, aiming to make its chips ready for the market by the end of the year. Due to the lower yields, its products may be delayed.

Samsung on the other hand had to recall more than 100,000 DRAM modules after PC OEMS [...]

When a company is forced to sell a highly profitable business in a high growth industry with very few players involved, everyone takes notice. With Toshiba’s memory business, a number of big names such as Western Digital, SK Hynix, Broadcom, Foxconn, TSMC and more have already entered bids for a majority stake in the company, but it looks like competition is about to get a whole lot more intense.

According to a new report from KoreaHerald, as many as 10 companies have entered bids for the Toshiba memory business including heavyweights such as Amazon, Apple, and Google. While these companies are traditionally not in the business of selling SSDs, they heavily [...]

In a new report from ITworld, it looks like Micron may be on track to begin shipping their 3D XPoint based products by the end of this year.

After branding their 3D XPoint based products as QuantX at Flash Memory Summit last year, Micron has been relatively silent about the upcoming technology. However, with all the buzz surrounding Intel’s launch of their first 3D XPoint based SSD, Micron has returned to the spotlight. However, unlike Intel, Micron is rumored to be licensing QuantX to other manufacturers as well as ship QuantX in the form of DDR-style memory DIMMs as well.

3D XPoint has been touted as the next generation flash memory technology that [...]