Samsung Electronics of Korea, the market leader; Micron Technology of the United States; Infineon Technologies of Germany; and Hynix Semiconductor of Korea -- the largest suppliers of memory chips in the $16 billion global market -- have all acknowledged being contacted by the Justice Department.
That's because SanDisk is the world's biggest supplier of flash memory products, which store data in such devices even when their power is turned off.
Jeff Mailloux, director of D-RAM marketing at Micron, this country's leading supplier of semiconductor memory, said that almost all the major memory producers were conducting research in the area.
The long-running saga over the future of Toshiba's memory chip business — the world's second largest supplier of NAND memory used in phones and PCs — took a big step forward after the Japanese company officially agreed [PDF] to an $18 billion sale to a consortium led by Bain Capital, which includes Apple among its backers.
On Tuesday, it will announce a deal with Hitachi to become the sole supplier of flash memory for Hitachi's forthcoming line of high-end solid-state computer drives intended for computer servers and storage systems.
The agreement calls for Micron to be Compaq's single largest supplier of computer memory chips.
But one of the major suppliers of commodity memory, Micron Technology, has some ideas about making memory smarter.
"Any impact on demand for mobile phones impacts the suppliers," said Graham Palmer, a spokesman for Intel, one of the largest suppliers of flash memory devices for mobile devices.
Started as supplier of add-on memory boards for minicomputers.
So he's been tested for this new challenge at the $28 billion 20000 revenues) electronics giant, which is probably the world's biggest supplier of DRAM chip memory.
