Leigh (Reuters) – Micron Technology said Tuesday it will put up a chip factory for sale in Leta, Utah, as it abandons making a kind of memory chip developed jointly with Intel almost a decade ago.
Lehi is the only Idaho-based micron factory to call 3D exposure memory, a form of memory chip that seeks to find a price-to-performance sweet spot between two dominant forms of memory chip: DRAM, which is also fast but expensive, and NAND. , Which is slow but inexpensive. The factory is expected to close by the end of this year, company officials told Reuters.
Micro introduced its first technology-based products in 2019 with a set of solid-state drives aimed at data center customers. Micron’s chief business officer Fisher Sumit Sadana told Reuters in an interview that he had received a good response from customers because they would have had to rewrite a large part of their software to take advantage of the new type of memory.
Low demand means that Micron will not be able to produce enough to justify the cost of continuing to develop chips, Sadana said. He said the factory would cost ક્રો 400 million a micron this year for under-use.
Following its exit from the 3D exposure market, Micron plans to shift its development efforts to take advantage of a new, faster industry standard to connect memory chips to computing chips called Compute Express Link.
“We will have a (higher) return on this new investment which will be much higher as it will be easier for the software software ecosystem to adopt,” Sadana said.
Micro jointly developed 3D exposure memory with Intel in 2012. The company currently has a supply agreement with Intel that runs until the end of this year. Intel has said it plans to develop future payloads of chips, using a separate brand name called “Opten” at one of its factories in New Mexico.
Sadana said Micron will keep all the intellectual property associated with the 3D exposure but is in touch with multiple potential buyers of the factory. While he could not name the parties or how much the factory would sell, he said bidders could go beyond memory companies to include computing chips, analog chips or chip contract manufacturers.
“It’s a good time for assets like this to be available, as many companies have been completely tapped from a supply capacity perspective,” Sadana said.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco, editing by Alexandra Hudson)
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