The agreement by Qimonda to transfer its 70nm DRAM process technology to SMIC, with 65nm possibly to follow, is the second such deal this year in which a memory manufacturer transfers a leading edge process to a foundry. The first was Spansion agreeing to develop a 40nm flash process with TSMC.
A 70nm DRAM process, and a 40nm flash process, are very much state of the art.
Whereas, in the past, memory manufacturers have used foundries for trailing edge production of older products, it has been assumed that they need, and always will need, their own fabs for developing and ramping new processes.
For instance, TSMC has been producing 110nm production flash wafers for Spansion since Q2 last year, and is ramping up on 90nm. But 110nm and 90nm are some way behind the state of the art as practised by flash memory market leader Samsung, which is in volume production of 8Gbit and 16Gbit flash on 50nm.
If memory manufacturers are now comfortable with the idea of bringing up leading edge processes at foundries, and the foundries are capable of getting to leading edge process capability simultaneously with the memory manufacturers, then it makes for some interesting possibilities in the memory sector.
Firstly, it could eliminate the specialist memory manufacturing sector, because any semiconductor company capable of designing a memory could get into the memory business; and secondly, it could allow the growth of a fabless memory industry.
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