Hynix and Numonyx Sign a Five-Year Agreement

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Hynix and Numonyx announce a five-year agreement to expand its joint development programs for the fast-growing NAND flash memory segment. The companies will broaden NAND product lines and bring future product and technology innovations designed to address challenges facing NAND technology over the next five years. Under the new agreement, Hynix and Numonyx will broaden the scope of their joint development efforts to deliver leading NAND memory technology and products and combine resources to accelerate the development of future NAND technologies and solutions. Also they will collaborate on mobile DRAM used in multichip packages for mobile phones.

Manufacturing NAND memory is getting more complex as the technology scales, or moves to smaller and smaller manufacturing lithography nodes. Charge-Trap Device NAND is anticipated to replace the current mainstream Floating Gate NAND technology and Numonyx's experience in NOR Flash-based technology should contribute greatly to this evolution. Moreover, memory suppliers in the next five years will need to have a deeper understanding of the device physics and overall memory system level solutions to overcome the challenges.

Effective utilization of Numonyx's software expertise will help in this effort and make a positive impact in market penetration and increasing market share for integrated NAND solutions such as microSD, eMMC, and SSD. The synergies between Hynix and Numonyx, combined with Numonyx's 40 year legacy of solving difficult non-volatile memory challenges, and experience developing firmware, microcontroller and other system solutions will be key factors in helping to solve the limitations of the technology–moving NAND from raw silicon to systems.

In addition to the collaboration on NAND, the companies also currently have a joint manufacturing initiative for the production of 300 mm low power mobile DRAM in their Chinese Wuxi joint venture. Mobile DRAM, commonly stacked with non-volatile memory in multi-chip packages is used by both companies in solutions for mobile devices. This collaboration on mobile DRAM will allow both companies to ship more cost effective, low power multi-chip memory subsystems to customers requiring small form factors.

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