Samsung and Hynix Team Up

Source: CDR Info

Proving that times are particularly hard for memory manufacturers, Samsung and Hynix, the two largest manufacturers of flash memory, have decided to work more closely to co-develop the next generation of memory. It is no less than a 9.6 billion dollar investment to be made, jointly, by the firms' R & D departments.
They hope to make significant breakthroughs that will allow them to offer new products and also to force their competitors to pay royalties in order to utilize the technology in their own flash modules.
It must be said that if this is accomplished with drastic price reductions, the future looks more than promising, especially with the advent of solid state disk drives (SSD), which should open up huge opportunities at the expense of platter-based disks. But to succeed, they must produce memory chips that will combine capacity and performance, things difficult to reconcile today.