Micron and Intel Live Webcast Today At 9AM PT – Update on Storage and Memory Technologies
Intel Corporation and Micron Technology, Inc. will be hosting a press and analyst live webcast today (scheduled for July 28th at 9am PT) in San Francisco. You can watch from home as the webcast appears to be open to everyone.
No details have been announced yet, but many people will be tuning in as Intel and Micron are two big tech companies that partnered together to create the IM Flash Technologies (IMFT) joint venture. Intel and Micron hosted a joint webcastback in March titled ‘Intel and Micron – A Strong Partnership’ that was used to announce the availability of their 3D NAND technology. Intel and Micron used that event to announce that they’d be moving from 2D planar NAND to vertically stacked 3D NAND to lower power usage, improve performance and allow for three times higher capacities NAND per die! At that time he two companies were using 3D NAND technology to stack flash cells vertically in 32 layers to achieve 256Gb multilevel cell (MLC) and 384Gb triple-level cell (TLC) die that fit within a standard package. The 256Gb MLC version of 3D NAND was sampling then, but the 384Gb TLC design wasn’t going to be sampling till late spring. Could we be seeing those 3.5TB M.2 SSDs that were being talked about today? We also heard a rumor that Micron will be mass producing most of their 3D NAND at its Singapore fab starting sometime 2016. The joint venture between Intel and Micron (IMFT) is believed to only include the Utah fab and Intel is able to get wafers at cost as part of the deal. If Micron will be making the bulk of their 3D NAND in Singapore that means there could be some sort of new partnership and a closer relationship between Micron and Intel that will be announced later today. Seagate and Micron have started working closer, so that might have Intel rattled a bit.
If that isn’t already enough to digest, the meeting could also be to related to the Wall Street Journal report from a couple weeks ago that announced Chinese state-owned semiconductor chip maker Tsinghua Unigroup was working on a $23 billion takeover bid for Micron. Interestingly, Intel spent 9 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) on a stake in Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd., owner of two Chinese smartphone chip designers, to speed up its access to the worlds largest mobile market in 2014. Could