Micron to enter the tablet market in 2012
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Dec. 13, 2011
Micron said earlier this morning that it is going to enter the tablet and ultrabook market in 2012 with SATA
solid state drives.
Kevin Kilbuck, Micron's marketing director for NAND solutions is saying that the chip maker is talking to ultrabook
vendors about its SATA interface.
Micron is increasing the overall output of its Singapore plant by about 60 percent, which is also roughly the
percentage demand growth rate that Kilbuck sees coming in the NAND market next year. The plant could produce up to
60,000 wafers a year, with that number doubling if Micron puts in the necessary capital investment.
Kilbuck said that Micron would move to 20 nm technology at its plant next year. Micron and Intel's IMTF joint
manufacturing venture has just announced the beginning of mass production of a 128 Gbit, 20 nm chip.
And while all of this is happening, Hynix has also announced 15 nm NAND technology with volume production expected
by mid-2012.
The controllers for Micron's new SSDs currently come from Marvell, and the company is looking for controller
chips from Taiwanese suppliers next year as well. Potential suppliers are Phison Electronics and Solid State Systems
Inc. from Taiwan.
In other hi tec news
Microsoft has released its new Silverlight 5 and made it available for download, all of this without
making too much noise about it.
But rumors also suggest that this may be the last major upgrade for the source code. Silverlight is a development
tool for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for internet and mobile applications.
Silverlight is a free plug-in, powered by Microsoft's .Net framework and compatible with multiple
browsers, devices and operating systems, bringing a new level of interactivity wherever the Web works.
Among the full list of improvements are hardware decoding of H.264 unprotected content using the GPU (graphical
processor unit), support for 64-bit browsers and a rewritten graphics stack using built-in XNA Games Studio 4.0 graphics
libraries for vertex shading and basic 3D. New sound effects have also been added, and a variable video replay rate have
also been designed.
And postscript Vector printing is now supported, which should improve the finished product and help reduce file
sizes. Text handling has seen several additions, including the character spacing and support for RichTextBlock and
OpenType.
Silverlight 5 is also using a new Trusted Application model from Redmond, which uses “a group policy registry key
and an application certificate, meaning users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks such as multiple
window support, full trust support in browser including COM and file system access, in browser HTML hosting within
Silverlight, and P/Invoke support for existing native code to be run directly from Silverlight,” the Silverlight team
said on its blog.
There has been some speculation that this could be the last version of Silverlight Microsoft ships, after redundancies
on the team and questions raised over the company’s commitment to cross-browser support and developer relations. Redmond
is saying it will support this build until 2021, and is still winning new customers, so it will be interesting to see
how this all pans out in the new year and in 2013.
Source: Micron Technology.
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