The memory business is headed towards the latest in a string of inflection points for the industry with the introduction of DDRII, DDR400, and DDR333 systems. At his keynote speech at VTF (VIA Technology Forum) Terry Lee, Micron’s Executive Vice President of Finance and Business development told attendees that the day of one size fits all in memory has long since passed.
Lee described a new reality for system builders and memory manufacturers in which different applications place different demands on systems and new types of memory are coming online to support those applications. Micron, a comparatively conservative company when it comes to adopting new memory technologies is introducing multiple DDR/DDR-II products at VIA’s Technology Platform. Lee told the audience that the ways in which we interact with our electronic data is changing. As a result different types of memory are required for different applications.
Micron has some specific ideas about the industry’s mainstream migration in memory. Although they are demonstrating DDR 400, they are not expecting it to be a mainstream technology in the same way that DDR 333 is. High-volume adoption of DDR-II is not expected until late 2003 and early 2004. According to Lee, DDR400 is a an incremental increase over DDR333.