LEHI (Reuters) – Micron Technology said on Tuesday it would offer a chip factory in Lehi, Utah, for sale, as it did not produce a type of memory chip it developed more than a decade ago with Intel.
Lehi is the Idron-based Micron’s only factory that calls 3D Xpoint memory, a form of memory chip aimed at finding a fun place between the two dominant forms of memory disk: DRAM, which is fast but is expensive. and NAND, which is slower but cheaper. The factory will be sold in a deal that is expected to close by the end of this year, company officials told Reuters.
In 2019, Micron launched its first technology-based products with a set of solid conditions targeted at data center customers. Sumit Sadana, chief operating officer of Micron, said in an interview with Reuters that they had received a loud response from customers because they would have to overwrite large parts of their software to take advantage of the new kind of memory.
The low demand means that Micron cannot scale production to a high volume to justify the cost of developing the chips, Sadana said. He said the underutilization of the factory would cost Micron $ 400 million this year.
After leaving the 3D Xpoint market, Micron plans to shift its development efforts to take advantage of a new, faster standard for connecting memory chips to computer chips called Compute Express Link.
“We will have a (return) on this new investment that will be much higher because it is easier for the software ecosystem to adopt,” Sadana said.
Micron has been developing the 3D Xpoint memory with Intel since 2012. The company currently has a supply agreement with Intel that expires at the end of this year. Intel said it plans to develop future generations of chips, for which it will use another brand called “Optane” at one of its factories in New Mexico.
Sadana said Micron will retain all the intellectual property associated with 3D Xpoint, but is in contact with several potential buyers for the factory. Although he could not name the parties or what the factory would sell for, he said the bidders could go beyond memory companies, including computer chip makers, analog chips or chip makers.
“This is a good time to have such an asset available, as several companies are only being fully exploited from an offering capability,” Sadana said.
(Report by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco, Edited by Alexandra Hudson)
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