Taipei, July 2, 2009 (CENS)--The recent excessive demands for DDR3 memory chips in contract market have obviously benefited Nanya Technology Corp. and Inotera Memories Inc. most as the two chipmakers began supplying the chips before most of their rivals.

Nanya`s spokesman, P.L. Bai, said the strong demands for consumer ultra low voltage (CULV) personal computers have driven up demands for DDR3 DRAM (double data rate dynamic random access memory) chips. He estimated supplies of the chips to be outpaced by demands this quarter, making the chips the first DRAM product to run short in the recent market cycle.

Bai noted that currently DDR3 chips trade mostly on the contract market, enabling the price quotation to stay at profitable levels. Compared with DDR2 chips, DDR3 are priced around 10% higher. His company is putting out 15,000 300mm wafers of 1Gb DDR3 chips a month and plans to ramp up the output to 20,000 wafers by the end of this year.

Bai said his company will migrate its DDR3 production to 50nm process two months after starting using 68nm process in preparation for production of 2Gb DDR3 chips.

Inotera`s president, Charles Kao, said the company is introducing Micron Technology`s 50nm process into it to put out 2Gb DDR3 chips. He said DDR3 chips are very profitable products at the company. His company is planning to invest US$1.6 billion to upgrade process to 50nm grade.


(by Ken Liu)