wbmw,
I actually thought these rumors were credible, until nothing came of it.
These things take a while to close. If indeed the transaction would involve STM and Intel NOR units as bases of this new entity, the fact that STM just recently took steps to make NOR unit more independent of the rest of the company would IMO be indicative that the plan is still on.
Fortunately for me, NOR flash is such a small part of what Intel actually does. I am actually more interested in NAND, given the synergy it has with PC products. I'd actually like to see Intel grow in this market, but I'm sure they have a long way to go before they acquire enough design wins to show anything material.
As far as design wins, they should not really be a barrier to NAND ramp. There is such a huge sea of commodity NAND flash out there that if Intel / Micron unit is cost competitive, there is a ready market out there already.
I agree about the synergy with PC products. It seems that finally, someone has finally done the obvious, and put a bunch of these NAND chips in parallel to create solid state disk drive alternative that are a little more competitive with disk drives in read and write throughput.
Flash clearly beats hard drives in access time, and it is just a logical progression until more of the chips are placed in parallel to match disk drives in throughput speeds. One thing in favor of solid state disks is that the advantage of the disk capacity of disk drives becomes less of a factor, IMO. A typical office PC does not need a TB of storage (which is what will become available this year). I think 100 to 200 GB is all you can reasonably need in a typical offic PC (where bunch of the stuff is on the server anyway). Even though hard drives have cost advantage, the advantage would be decreasing over time.
Joe
PS: Spansion is not completely shut out of the NAND market. But it will take a number of steps before they can start competing there. The prerequisites are 300mm fab, 45nm, ORNAND and QuadBit. QuadBit is already here, so is ORNAND. 300mm fab is in the initial phases (building is there, Spansion is probably now in process of placing orders for equipment) and 45nm is still a bit more than a step away. So Spansion in NAND market is there only for a long term investment perspective.
The advantage for Spansion is that floating gate will apparently runs out of steam before charge trapping (basis of MirrorBit) as far as process shrinks - according to some sources. One of which appears to be Samsung, which has it (charge trapping) on their roadmap as one of the possibilities.
Joe
