Back when smartphones were still gaining popularity, there was still a time where memory cards had capacities in megabytes rather than gigabytes. In the modern market, this figure has broken past the terabyte mark as well, but it seems that Micron intends to push the boundary even further.

The company has just announced the world’s highest capacity microSD card, which features a whopping 1.5TB of storage. This is made possible through the brand’s new i400 microSD card that has a maximum storage capacity of up to 1.5TB, which is a massive amount of additional storage for electronic devices that support memory expansion via a microSD card slot.

Although, its still unfortunate that most modern smartphones do not support this technology, there are a number of other applications still. Micron managed to achieve record breaking capacity by using 176 layer 3D NAND technology, which is also the same tech that is used in SSDs. In other words, it basically means that memory cells are stacked on top of one another in a 3D pattern.

However, this also implies that the new memory card will likely have a rather premium price tag in the beginning, which is typically true for most new technologies that break records. But, this also means that the previous gen 1TB models will soon become more affordable as well.

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Micron Technology is ready to expand its workforce in India. The company’s Managing Director for India has told the Hindu Business Line that it will hire more employees in the next three years. Further, the company is also planning to establish a Center of Excellence and expand industry-academia collaboration in the country.

As per the report(via Digitimes), Anand Ramamoorthy, Managing Director of Micron Technology (India), says the company will increase headcount. Precisely, it will recruit about 3,600 more employees. This would bring the final tally to 5,000 employees by 2023. He says that the company has rapidly expanded by tripling the headcount in the last 12 months.

For the unware, Micron Technology is a US-based memory chip maker. Its portfolio of products includes computer memory, computer data storage, dynamic RAM(DRAM), flash memory(NAND flash), and USB flash drives. Headquartered in Boise, Idaho, the company has expertise in SSD, graphics memory, and LPDDR5 DRAM for 4G and 5G smartphones.

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As for India, the company, in 2018, allocated $3 billion for investment in Hyderabad. Moreover, it’s expanded a lot in the Asian region as well. In fact, it has back-end fabs in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and China. In case you don’t know, back end of line (BEOL) is where individual parts mingle with the wiring on the wafer.

Micron is very positive about growing electronics manufacturing industry in India and is considering increasing its presence in India. Micron has agreed to set up a Center of Excellence in memory and storage systems in India with Govt. of India.

— Ravi Shankar Prasad (@rsprasad) December 14, 2020

However, the company reportedly is far away from setting up a production line in India. Although things are looking good for the country in the distant future, it isn’t going to make haste decisions regarding this right now. Still, the company is ready for academic tie-ups in the country.

Ramamoorthy says that Micron has authorized its University Research Alliance of Micron (URAM) to facilitate industry-academia collaboration for research and innovation in memory design. According to the Indian Minister of Electronics & IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Micron has also agreed set up a center of Excellence in memory and storage systems with Govt. of India.

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On 18th December 2019, Micron Technology Inc stated that it is expecting a recovery after a “cyclical bottom” in the second quarter earlier this year. The primary reasons for its projected recovery in the arriving year are due to the company receiving all requested licenses to supply its products to its biggest client, Huawei.

Micron was facing stagnancy in its growth in the memory market from the beginning of the year. However, the main blow arrived when its largest customer got placed on the Entity List. Huawei, the smartphone manufacturer, was banned from the US Commerce Department in early 2019 which had led many US based companies to cut their business ties with it.

A few of those include Google with its Android OS platform, ARM with its chipset architecture and even Micron Technology for its memory-based chips. Initially, when the US Government imposed the ban on Huawei, many American companies had also been against the move since they had heavily relied on the Chinese tech giant.

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Since Huawei is also one of the leading telecom companies that supply advanced 5G networking infrastructure; a few of the local telecom companies also suffered when the ban was imposed. All of this points to a domino effect that spans multiple corporations if a key player in the market gets affected.

According to the Chief Executive of Micron, Sanjay Mehrotra, the company is expecting business to recover by the third quarter of 2020. The recovery is made possible by the licenses to work with Huawei being granted after the declining performance in Q2 2019. In June, Micron had also stated that it could legally ship some of its products to Huawei even during the ban was enforced. Although whether the company received the license when the US Government began granting them in November is still unknown.

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(Via)

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US memory chip maker Micron Technology has officially issued a statement announcing the suspension of supply of its memory chips to Huawei. This is in compliance with the trade ban imposed on the Chinese company by the US government.

In the statement, Micron pointed out that as a US company with global business, Micron respects and abides by all laws and regulations of the United States and the countries in which it operates, and has suspended supply to Huawei to comply with US government regulations. In addition, Micron also sent a letter requesting that the major module manufacturers cooperate, noting that it is not allowed to directly or indirectly supply related modules such as memory cards or solid-state drives using Micron memory chips to Huawei and its related companies.

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However, the ban seems to hurt Micron more than Huawei. According to Micron’s financial report, as of the first half of 2019, 13% of the company’s revenue came from Huawei. On the other hand, data from Bloomberg listed the top 10 semiconductor suppliers for Huawei to be Foxconn, BYD, TSMC, OuFeiguang, FIH Mobile, Flextronics, SK Hynix, Broadcom, Qualcomm and Universe. There is only one memory chip manufacturer, that is SK Hynix, ranked seventh. In other words, Huawei has other options apart from Micron.

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(source)

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