<p>Early October contract prices for NAND flash memory slipped further with 64Gb chips having the largest drop of 5-7%. But market watchers expect demand for high-density NAND chips to pick up for year-end holiday sales and help offset slowing orders for memory cards and drives.<br /> Tablet PCs and smartphones demand high-density NAND chips, and are expected to boom during the year-end holiday season, according to sources at downstream companies. However, demand for memory cards and portable drives is still slow, the sources indicated.<br /> On the supply side, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba have already adopted 20nm-class process technologies for their NAND flash chip production, and also ramping production of 3-bit per cell chips. Both vendors' capacity ramp-ups also resulted in NAND flash price drops for the former part of October, the sources said.<br /> However, the sources believe that Samsung and Toshiba will likely slow down their output growth later in 2010, due to concerns that an oversupply may occur when the industry enters its traditional slow season.<br /> The sources revealed that major NAND flash producers are reluctant to drop their prices further as current quotes are very close to their cost levels.<br /> Early October contract prices for 64Gb MLC NAND chips slid 5.6-7% to average US$10.08, while the 32Gb segment saw a modest drop to US$5.23 on average. Prices for both 16Gb and 8Gb remained almost flat at US$3.74 and US$3.60, respectively.</p> <p> <br /> </p> | 