Remember when you guys were touting YMTC X-Stacking...???
Chinese memory manufacturer YMTC is at risk of exiting the market for 3D NAND Flash products by 2024 following its formal placement on the Entity List of the US Commerce Department on December 15, TrendForce reports.
evertiq.com
YMTC could abandon 3D NAND flash market by 2024
TrendForce points out that without the support of the key equipment providers, YMTC is now facing a huge technical obstacle in the development of its latest 3D NAND Flash technology known as Xtacking 3.0. In particular, raising yield rate for the 128L and 232L processes is going to be extremely challenging for the Chinese memory manufacturer.
TrendForce has also observed that NAND Flash buyers outside of China now harbor significant reservations about adopting YMTC’s technology. A US-based smartphone brand has hold off on procuring mobile storage solutions from YMTC. At the same time, PC OEMs that were previously going to qualify YMTC’s client SSDs have temporarily halted the customer sampling and adoption process. Based on the latest investigation, TrendForce believes that YMTC will likely be limited to operating only within Mainland China in the future. Moreover, since the Chinese memory manufacturer is being seriously hindered in its efforts to advance towards higher-layer 3D NAND technologies, it will eventually lose out on opportunities to gain more market share via capacity expansion activities.
A few months ago, I called X-Stacking as innovative
BUT logistically problematic. How about the probability that those manufacturing issues affected per wafer yield? Basically, for each complete X-stack die there must be two wafer lines, that is the logistical problem.
- There must be two extractions, one for the memory die and one for the controller die.
- There must be two bondings, one for the memory to the controller,
THEN one for mated pair at the package step.
- There must be two product trackings, one for which memory die is functional, and one for which controller die is functional, and if there is a mismatch after the first bonding, the entire pair must be scrapped.
And that is just a short list. Were there enough problems post bondings that gave customers pause at adopting YMTC's new NAND process? Most likely there were. The industry has grown to expect %95 yield as standard. If I buy a batch of 100 for testing and found 15 failures, that is a batch fail even if the other 85 works perfectly. I cannot afford to install batches of 85 into my products, be it a washing machine or a car.
Granted, the operative word here is 'could', not 'will', that YMTC to exit the NAND market in 2024. But once those customers signed contracts with alternatives, that is at least two yrs wait for YMTC to even
TRY to entice some of them back again.
Micron going out of business?