Japanese memory firms Elpida and Toshiba were reported as talking to unite or even being pushed together. Industry tips to Digitimes had the Japanese government acting as a broker to have Elpida match its RAM business with Toshiba's flash memory. The government would hope to hedge against the incursions of Korean and American companies like Hynix, Intel, and Samsung.
Elpida on Wednesday started shipping test samples of some of the world's first four-gigabit (512MB), low-power DDR3 memory for mobile devices. The storage is both high capacity but also uses a new technique known as Wide IO to dramatically improve the speed. By moving to an "x512-bit" bandwidth, it would leap to as much as 12.8GB per second, or about 10 times more than usual.
Intellectual Ventures swung back into its patent lawsuit campaign by targeting Motorola Mobility, with the company now filing a patent infringement complaint (PDF) in the US District Court of Delaware. According to the company's Chief Litigation Counsel Melissa Finocchio said Intellectual Ventures and Motorola Mobility weren't able to reach a licensing agreement after lengthy negotiations. It thus has a responsibility to its current customers and investors to defend its intellectual property rights, the company claimed.
Industry sources purported Wednesday night that Apple was increasing its orders for NAND flash memory and RAM from Japanese suppliers. The parts, which Digitimes suggests would respectively come from Toshiba and Elpida, would help it further reduce dependence on Samsung. Both Apple and Samsung are involved in reciprocal lawsuits, and Apple is likely eager to avoid any retaliation from Samsung through the supply chain.
Industry contacts divulged early Wednesday that Apple was investing $1 billion into a Sharp LCD plant. The proposed deal would guarantee a steady supply of screens for iPads and iPhones, Reuters said. It would combine with a now supposedly corroborated investment in Toshiba to the same ends.
Intellectual Ventures late Monday continued a string of lawsuits against technology firms with a new lawsuit (below) claiming companies violate five patents for system memory. The complaint hits direct memory part suppliers such as Adata, Elpida, Hynix, and Kingston but also some of their customers, such as Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Logitech. Even Best Buy and Walmart, stores merely selling the products, are included in the Seattle-based suit.
A new teardown of the just shipping Atrix 4G has uncovered a very easy-to-fix design. The iFixit deconstruction shows a device that has relatively little glue and is fairly easily disassembled with just a few screws and clips. Unlike the iPhone 4 and many other phones, the LCD also isn't fused to the glass, making a fix cheaper in the event of a drop.
Patent holder Intellectual Ventures has initiated lawsuits against a long list of tech companies that failed to establish licensing agreements. One of the suits targets security software makers Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro and Check Point. A second suit is aimed at memory manufacturers Elpida Memory and Hynix Semiconductor, while a third suit has been filed against component makers Altera, Lattice and Microsemi.
The European Union today fined a collective of memory producers 331.3 million euros (about $404.4 million) for price fixing. Electronics giants Hitachi, Mitsubishi, NEC, Samsung and Toshiba as well as Elpida, Hynix, Infineon and Nanya admitted they artificially kept RAM prices high between at least 1998 and 2002 by secretly coordinating pricing between each other. Samsung faces the largest fine and will pay 145.7 million euros ($177.8 million), but Infineon will also pay a large 56.7 million euros ($69.2 million) for its involvement.
The European Union is about to fine nine companies a total of $370 million for allegedly fixing pricing on flash memory, leaks revealed on Monday. Samsung, Hynix, Toshiba and six other major companies are being pressed to admit to colluding on high prices in exchange for seeing a 10 percent drop in the fines levied against each company. An NYT contact believed a ruling could come as soon as Wednesday.
Computer memory maker Elpida has filed a lawsuit against Infineon and Best Buy, spurred on by a complaint at the US International Trade Commission filed against it by Infineon. With the complaint, German-based Infineon attempted to stop Elpida from importing and selling some of its DRAM modules in the US. This earned a lawsuit from Elpida, which alleged Infineon and Best Buy infringes on Elpida's semiconductor integrated circuits.
Elpida this morning set what it believes is a new benchmark for memory with the launch of the first 1-gigabit XDR RAM with 32-bit bandwidth. The storage not only makes large amounts of fast memory possible but is also billed as some of the fastest memory of any kind. A 7.2GHz clock speed along with the extra bandwidth gives the memory much more headroom: the new XDR chip has up to 28.8GB per second, or about nine times more than the fastest stock DDR3 memory and twice as much as Elpida's previous best.
Elpida says it has expanded its lineup of DDR3 RAM with what it says is the most energy-efficient memory of the type. A new format based on a 50 nanometer manufacturing process helps both reduce the size of each chip to 40mm (1.6in) square and also reduces the amount of power necessary to drive the memory. Where most DDR3 needs 1.5 volts, the new memory can scale back to 1.35V or even 1.2V in notebooks, servers and other low-profile computers that may not run at full power.
Elpida on Tuesday claims to have broken a record by becoming the first memory manufacturer to develop 16-gigabyte fully buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) RAM sticks, significantly expanding the memory ceiling for pro workstations and servers. The DDR2-based creation is twice as capacious as still-rare 8GB sticks and relies on a unique integrated packaging to fit the memory without creating excess. Although 16GB, the RAM is unusually thin at 0.3in deep and has the same power needs as a simpler 8GB stick.
