n recent months, some Asian DRAM memory manufacturers have been getting away with selling untested ("UTT") DRAMs. Disturbingly, the practice seems to be getting traction at the lower portion of the module business.
This is being done mostly by Taiwanese DRAM makers, who are undercutting the tier-1 guys by selling untested and unmarked parts. The untested yield is high enough that Asian houses are putting then straight into modules and selling them. Any fallout is reworked or returned by the customer and replaced. Apparently the net cost under such a business model is still cheaper than testing the integrated circuits (ICs).
I equate mismarking of DRAM units with counterfeiting. (I see this as a logical extension of all the sub-$200 Rolexes being advertised in spam. When they stop one guy doing it, it indicates that he was having some success; a half-dozen will pop up around the next corner.) It risks driving everybody's price down to the lowest-price Asian house over the course of a couple quarters. Selling UTT parts saves on test costs, which, as I've heard for Hynix for a 256Mb DRAM was/is around $0.25 per unit; and from what I can tell, this appears to be at the low end.
All suppliers have the capability to churn out top-notch material. It's just a matter of how much do they want to spend on manufacturing. (And money is cheap!) The "innovation" here is identifying tier-1 companies that spend too much on testing. An untested tier-2 DRAM is close enough in quality that the savings in test cost can generate a decisive cost difference.
Winbond is one Taiwanese chip company rumored to be producing a relatively small quantity of UTT chips. But chatter in the industry suggests that Winbond may increase its UTT output to 2 to 3 million 256Mbit-equivalent units over the next few months. Winbond's UTT chips are not labeled with the Winbond logo.
http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/194256
Winbond UTT anyone
This is being done mostly by Taiwanese DRAM makers, who are undercutting the tier-1 guys by selling untested and unmarked parts. The untested yield is high enough that Asian houses are putting then straight into modules and selling them. Any fallout is reworked or returned by the customer and replaced. Apparently the net cost under such a business model is still cheaper than testing the integrated circuits (ICs).
I equate mismarking of DRAM units with counterfeiting. (I see this as a logical extension of all the sub-$200 Rolexes being advertised in spam. When they stop one guy doing it, it indicates that he was having some success; a half-dozen will pop up around the next corner.) It risks driving everybody's price down to the lowest-price Asian house over the course of a couple quarters. Selling UTT parts saves on test costs, which, as I've heard for Hynix for a 256Mb DRAM was/is around $0.25 per unit; and from what I can tell, this appears to be at the low end.
All suppliers have the capability to churn out top-notch material. It's just a matter of how much do they want to spend on manufacturing. (And money is cheap!) The "innovation" here is identifying tier-1 companies that spend too much on testing. An untested tier-2 DRAM is close enough in quality that the savings in test cost can generate a decisive cost difference.
Winbond is one Taiwanese chip company rumored to be producing a relatively small quantity of UTT chips. But chatter in the industry suggests that Winbond may increase its UTT output to 2 to 3 million 256Mbit-equivalent units over the next few months. Winbond's UTT chips are not labeled with the Winbond logo.
http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/194256
Winbond UTT anyone
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