Storage recovery kicks off! Silicon Motion, a major control chip manufacturer, stated that North American data centers began to pull in stock in March, and demand in China has not decreased after the Lunar New Year. NAND manufacturers will make profits in the first quarter, and most will profit in the second quarter. OEM manufacturers agree that NAND prices will rise by 20% in the second quarter. Coupled with the demand driven by AI PCs and AI smartphones, everyone is not blindly expanding production. The tight supply will last until the first half of next year. “NAND and DRAM prices will continue to rise,” and the second half of this year will be better than the first half, with all markets expected to recover next year.
Wallace Gou, the general manager of Silicon Motion, mentioned that North American data centers started pulling in stock in March, and the demand in China did not decrease after the Lunar New Year. The data center’s recovery is mainly related to AI demand and AI servers. Qualcomm and MediaTek have a positive outlook for this year, with mobile phone growth expected to reach 5-6%. AI PCs and AI smartphones are driving the demand for DDR5, and with phone and chip manufacturers building their large language models, the prices of NAND and DRAM are expected to rise continuously.
The market is focused on whether Flash and DRAM prices will return to reduction levels.
Kou pointed out that NAND prices would rebound the most, as there is a significant investment in the next generation of NAND, which will be in mainstream products and will not be cheaper but more expensive instead. They also hope Apple will place orders, and the NAND product cycle will extend to two years per generation.
Silicon Motion’s main products have shifted from 28nm to 12nm and then to 6nm, with three 6nm products taped out from the third quarter of last year to this year.
Silicon Motion has invested 4 billion New Taiwan dollars to build a new headquarters building in the Zhubei High-Speed Rail area, expected to be completed by the end of June to July this year. After applying for a usage license, they plan to relocate by the end of the first quarter of next year, which will accommodate 1500 people.
Tech Alert: 6nm EUV manufacturing, Silicon Motion introduces UFS 4.0 controller SM2756
On March 13th, Silicon Motion announced the launch of its UFS 4.0 controller SM2756, targeting AI smartphones, edge computing, and automotive applications, manufactured using the 6nm EUV lithography process.
Silicon Motion also introduced the UFS 3.1 controller SM2753, creating a comprehensive product line covering UFS 2.2 to 4.0.
The UFS 4.0 controller SM2756 utilizes the MIPI M-PHY low-power architecture, balancing high performance and energy efficiency, meeting the all-day computing demands of today’s high-end and AI mobile devices.
The SM2756 offers continuous read performance exceeding 4300 MB/s and continuous write speeds over 4000 MB/s, supporting a wide range of 3D TLC and QLC NAND flash memory with densities up to 2 TB.
According to IT Home, the second-generation SM2753 UFS 3.1 controller solution uses the MIPI M-PHY HS-Gear 4 x 2-lane and SCSI Architecture Model (SAM) based on a high-speed serial link, with a single-channel design, utilizing the latest generation of 3D TLC and QLC NAND. It provides a continuous read performance of 2150 MB/s and a write performance of 1900 MB/s, meeting the growing UFS 3 market demand for mainstream and value smartphones, IoT, and automotive applications.
Silicon Motion states that the latest UFS controllers are equipped with advanced LDPC ECC technology and SRAM data error detection and correction, enhancing data reliability, improving performance, and reducing power consumption.
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