The NOR flash market is moving toward a more balanced supply/demand situation, Taiwan's Winbond Electronics has commented. Chip prices have slipped at a much slower pace after larger declines during the fourth quarter of 2010, Winbond indicated.
Winbond said it has been actively seeking NOR-chip orders from first-tier consumer electronics companies. Winbond plans to roll out new products including 3V parallel flash devices in 2011, expanding its product portfolio that only had six serial flash series in 2010.
Winbond is also looking to transition its NOR production process to 58nm from 90nm in the third quarter of 2011 to help lower production costs significantly, the company noted.
As for mobile RAM, Winbond now offers pseudo SRAM and low-power DRAM to meet the rising demand. The company is also scheduled to migrate to 65nm process technology for its mobile RAM products by the end of 2011.
Winbond announced revenues of NT$2.6 billion (US$89 million) for January 2011, up 0.7% on month and 10% on year. Including sales generated by logic IC subsidiary Nuvoton Technology, Winbond saw January consolidated revenues increase 1.1% sequentially and 6.4% from a year earlier to NT$3.17 billion.
Around mid-2009, Winbond unveiled plans to give more emphasis to niche-market DRAM and NOR flash products, and reduce its exposure to the PC DRAM sector. The company swung to net profits of NT$3.55 billion in 2010, after three years of losses.