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Spot price of low-density NAND Flash has gained strong impetus this week, thanks to demand upsurge from bandit iPad makers in China.
As of noon session of July 30, spot price of 16Gb and 32Gb MLC NAND Flash chips have grown by 4% and 2% to USD5 and USD6.81, respectively.
We have seen a stronger demand uptick for both 16Gb and 32Gb NAND Flash this week (July 26-30), with such demand not only come from memory card makers. Many China-based brokers/traders sourced low-density flash for use in bandit iPad, which usually carries a memory density of 16GB.
Since controllers in these bandit iPads only support 8-bit ECC (error-correction code) configuration, only those chips which are fabricated on 5x nm are compatible. Most mainstream USB drive/memory cards nowadays have their ECC configuration advanced to 12-bit or above as most have adopted 4x/3x nm. Controllers on 4x nm chips support 12-bit ECC and 3x nm support 24-bit.
As most vendors have migrated their mainstream process to 4x/3x nm, the demand upsurge thus led to a sudden supply strain. Currently SEC and Hynix are the two major suppliers for 5x nm at channels, with the former fabricates on 50nm and the later on 48nm. Where rivals’ 5x nm production (e.g. IM’s 50nm and Toshiba’s 50nm) have most been phased out. |