Cheap DRAMs forced Intel out of this lousy commodity business and into high-margin microprocessors.
It is now the largest manufacturer of DRAMs and the fourth-largest maker of all kinds of semiconductors by value.
The free classic tour runs through 19th-century warehouses and mash rooms and includes three drams of Glenfiddich.
Stone points out that not many drams are actually making money in 2D.
Having entered the semiconductor market in 1983, Samsung was the first company to manufacture 16-MB DRAMs on a mass scale in 1991.
Samsung wants to reduce its reliance on commodity semiconductors, or DRAMs, whose profits vary wildly depending on the ups and downs of the product cycle.
For some reason, a variety of analysts have simultaneously waxed bullish on the company, which makes both DRAMs and NAND flash memory chips.
The company is speeding up production of 64-megabit DRAMs, which are in great demand for computers hungry for memory to run graphics-intensive software.
But prices of DRAMs (dynamic random access memory chips) have continued to fall and there are few signs of demand picking up any time soon.
You see, cheap DRAMs from Japan and Korea didn't kill Intel.
Not only will currently-oversupplied products like LCD screens and DRAMs remain in an oversupply, but other components that are not currently oversupplied will enter an oversupply this quarter.
In the spot market, according to the web site DRAMeXchange, prices today jumped 5% in the spot market for DRAMs, with 10%-20% increased for NAND flash memory.
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The same would go for other semiconductors, such as DRAMs. It would also delay by 30 years, until 2040, the date when silicon semiconductors reach their theoretical limit.
Not just that: it needed capital to finance a major production shift to the next generation of 64-byte DRAMs that will replace the current 16-byte model late next year.
Looking ahead, the global HDD supply shortage is expected to be alleviated in the second quarter and demand for specialty DRAM products including mobile and server DRAMs will be strong.
Now, while this is a great situation for a whisky aficionado, it does make the job of winnowing down the list difficult, and some awfully good drams had to be left out.
Singapore makes lots of other electronics devices: printers, CD-ROM drives, DVD drives and printed circuit boards -- not to mention DRAMs (memory chips) and the sound cards and graphics cards found in PCs.
The analyst contends that the steep price declines in DRAMs late in calendar 2010 lead to a quicker industry correction, as rival memory chip makers announced production cuts and pushed out capacity expansion plans.
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Even two decades after the Apollo moon mission, all the energies of hardware manufacturing firms were focused on semiconductors (like DRAMs or CPUs), color televisions, cars, Walkmans, CDs, VHS recorders, and a new consumer item called the personal computer.
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Most recently, stiff competition and the rising cost of improving chips has made it even harder for surviving makers of dynamic random-access memory, the chips known as DRAMs that are used to store data in personal computers and server systems.
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