Analyses of the memory market put out by research firms have been the usual depressing read. The NOR flash memory seems all but wiped out with no vendor making a profit over the last three years. Worldwide NOR revenue shrunk by about 9.3 percent last year and is expected to further decline by two percent this year.

Last month, iSuppli Corp. revised its projection of the NAND flash market to a 9 percent growth reaching $15.2 billion in 2008—down from the previous forecast of 27 percent growth to reach $17.9 billion. That's $4 billion slashed. iSuppli blames the NAND flash slowdown on the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis and its impact worldwide. The firm says this will depress consumer spending on MP3 players, USB flash drives and digicams this year.

Yet not all are living in the current mess. A number of companies are looking beyond this forecast. Powerchip broke ground on two fabs in April to create 12-inch facilities that will employ 3,600 in Taiwan. The fabs will use sub-50nm process technology to produce DRAM and NAND flash products.

When Intel Corp. and STMicroelectronics spun-off Numonyx BV on March 31, they too had their sights set beyond the immediate crunch with intentions to ride on process and other technological innovations. Numonyx at birth is the No. 1 supplier of memory chips for mobile handsets with 26 percent global market share.

NOR flash hope
Numonyx plans to brave the weak NOR flash market by expanding beyond standalone devices to memory solutions, perhaps as multichip packages, for wireless handsets. The company has established ties with Hynix Semiconductor Inc. to supply NAND flash and DRAM so it can offer mobile and embedded memory solutions.

And the company is banking on new technology beyond this year. Apart from developing floating-gate flash manufacturing technology at 32nm, it is developing phase change memory

Rambus Inc., in the meantime has its "Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative." It features new memory signaling innovations that allow data rates of 16Gbit/s and a new memory architecture that can deliver terabyte per second of memory bandwidth to a single SoC.

And if you think nothing much is happening on the DRAM front, look again. Innovative Silicon Inc. has developed what it calls the Z-RAM, a single-transistor DRAM that uses the SOI process to form capacitance between the transistor and the underlying insulator.

Indeed, investment in R&D and engineering ingenuity is helping memory companies tide over depressed markets.

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