Micron Technology Case Study

1. ABSTRACT

This abstract briefly describes on the history of Micron Technologies and its products such as DRAM, NAND and NOR flash memory. Micron Technologies is the global leading company in semiconductor industry and for more than 35 years Micron has been marked its presence in semiconductor industry by innovations and transformations which contributes customer requirement and need of market.

Micron technology Inc. is an American based company with its headquarters at Boise, Idaho founded as a semiconductor design consulting company. In 1981 the company made great move to manufacturing of 64K DRAM chips with its first wafer fabrication named Fab 1. In 2005 Micron and Intel formed a joint venture named IM flash technologies in Lehi, Utah

When a volatile memory loses its power connection, it will also lose its contents and data is deleted. The most common example of volatile memory is Random Access Memory (RAM) which are used to temporarily hold data that is required to run programs or applications on a computer or similar electronic device. The advantages of volatile memories are fast functioning and well suited to protect sensitive data, since it will be quickly deleted when it loses its power connection. Volatile memories are further sub classified into Static memory and Dynamic memory. Static memory can retain its data indefinitely as long as there is a power connection and it will only consume less power to retain data whereas dynamic memory can only retain data for a small period of time when power is on and it requires periodic refresh to retain data where power is consumed during refresh. Examples of static memory and dynamic memory are CPU cache etc. and SDRAM

Actually flash memory is the improved version of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM). The main advantage of the Flash memory is, Flash memory erases and writes its data in entire block whereas EEPROM can erases and rewrite data in byte level, which makes flash memory very fast compared to EEPROM. But there is main disadvantage of the flash memory is it cannot replace DRAM and SRAM because the speed at which the DRAM/SRAM can access data and also their ability to address at byte level can’t match by flash. Since there are no moving parts in flash memory unlike to hard disk drive, flash also called as Solid-state Storage Devices