Toshiba is now officially looking for a minority investor in its NAND flash business. Western Digital, who has a joint stake in NAND flash fabs with Toshiba is one of the companies in the bidding for a piece of a $3.2B business. In addition to Western Digital several other companies from the US, Taiwan and Korea are looking to purchase a stake in Toshiba’s NAND business.
Micron Technology and SK Hynix are also among the five firms who have submitted bids for a piece of Toshiba’s NAND business. Other potential investors include Bain Capital and Taiwanese electronic contract manufacturer Foxconn. According to EE Times, Toshiba would prefer to sell a minority stake in its NAND flash business to a private equity firm—hence Bain Capital.
SK Hynix is looking for ways to increase its NAND flash production. Seagate Technology had been reported to be considering an investment in NAND flash production fabs with SK Hynix in the last month. Micron would like to increase its market share and a Toshiba investment could help it do that although Toshiba 3D NAND is very different than Micron’s 3D NAND.
Seagate could really use some NAND fab capacity to support its ventures into enterprise SSDs. Another potential suitor conspicuously missing is Chinese investor Tsinghua Unisplendour, who made offers to invest in Western Digital and Micron in the past. Tsinghua is said to be building a $30B memory fabrication facility in China. This new fab will join two other Chinese memory fabs in construction (the XMC and Yangtze River Storage Technology fabs).
With a chip of this size a 512 GB SSD could be made with only 8 chips. Western Digital says that the new chip doubles the density of its first 64-layer 3D NAND chip introduced in July 2016.
Note that 512 TB SSD packages smaller than a postage stamp, including a controller have been available from companies like Samsung using their 3D V-NAND technology since 2016. The Western Digital/Toshiba chips should allow them to make similar capacity products or even higher.
Flash memory is going into more and more enterprise applications. Quantum said that SSDS used for metadata operations in its DXi6900-S allowed fast ingest, replication and space reclamation performance on its HDD-based storage systems. Using flash memory helped the product consumer 50% less power than competitive offerings.
NAND flash memory is growing in popularity in data centers as well as consumer products. The eager bidding for a piece of Toshiba’s NAND flash business reflects the desire for many players to strengthen their position in this market.
Tom Coughlin consults and writes on digital storage and applications. He is chairman of the Storage Visions and Creative Storage Conferences, tomcoughlin.com
source: forbes
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