Toshiba up on flash memory
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Japanese electronics group Toshiba Corp  (6502.T) posted a 38.4 percent rise in quarterly operating  profit on Monday, thanks to strong sales of its flash memory  chips, and it raised its full-year outlook closer to market  estimates.
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MUNICH, Germany  - Fujitsu-Siemens Computers will  start selling laptops with flash memory instead of hard drives  this summer, bringing faster, lighter and more energy-efficient  computers to the European mass market.
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Japanese electronics group Toshiba Corp  posted a 38.4 percent rise in quarterly operating profit on Monday, thanks to strong sales of its flash memory chips, and it raised its full-year outlook closer to market estimates.
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By Kyodo News International, Tokyo  Jan. 31--TOKYO -- Toshiba Corp. on Wednesday revised downward its group  operating profit for this business year to 250 billion yen, compared with 270  billion yen estimated in October, due to sharp declines in flash memory  prices.
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Toshiba and SanDisk will build a new state-of-the-art flash memory chip factory together starting in 2009, and will share the output from it, the companies announced Tuesday.Separately, Toshiba announced it will begin construction of two more chip factories of its own at the same time. One of the plants will be for NAND flash memory, while the second will be for other semiconductor products.The three factories will make 300-millimeter (12-inch) wafers, which can cost up to $3.6 billion each to build and equip with the latest technology. The companies did not announce the size of their investments.All three will be built in Japan. No site in Japan has yet been determined for the joint Toshiba/SanDisk factory, while the two Toshiba-only factories will be built in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture, and in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture.Toshiba and SanDisk are just two players in a competitive NAND flash memory market. Other manufacturers include South Korea&#39;s Samsung Electronics; Japan&#39;s Elpida Memories; Taiwan&#39;s Powerchip Semiconductor, and a company jointly created by Micron and Intel of the U.S., IM Flash Technologies.The new factories will help Toshiba cement its number one ranking among NAND flash memory makers, said Wayne Chen, NAND flash analyst at DRAMeXchange Technology, which runs an online clearing house for the chips. Samsung is Toshiba&#39;s fiercest rival in NAND.The global memory chip industry is currently suffering from a production glut that has sent the prices of some memory chips down below their production costs. The glut seems set to continue, as a number of manufacturers either have new factories under construction or have announced plans for new production lines over the past several months.Toshiba&#39;s factory announcement could further depress the NAND flash market psychologically because traders may believe the glut will continue due to more factory construction, said Chen. But output from the factories won&#39;t hit the market for years, he pointed out.By targeting construction for 2009, Toshiba is signalling confidence that demand for flash memory, and NAND flash in particular, will rise to end the current glut. Production at the Toshiba-SanDisk plant will not start until 2010, according to their memorandum of understanding. The two Toshiba factories are also targeting production for 2010.The good news for users is that the massive investments will keep the price of NAND flash memory down, which should lead to larger storage capacities in digital cameras, digital music players and other consumer devices.NAND flash memory has grown in popularity over the past several years due to its ability to store songs, pictures and other data when power is shut off, as well as for its reliability in consumer devices such as Apple iPods and the iPhone. NAND manufacturers are targeting SSDs (solid-state disks) as another major product area of the future, to replace HDDs (hard disk drives). SSDs use less power than HDDs, an important difference in small devices, and are more reliable because they contain no moving parts.
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Blog: A Sony battery in a Toshiba laptop that was part of last year's massive recall caught fire last month in Great Britain.
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(InfoWorld) - Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has begun producing a flash memory-based solid-state disk drive for mobile computing applications. The drive is the latest in a growing line of products from Samsung and competitors that make use of flash memory chips instead of magnetic disc recording technology. Compared to today's hard-disk drives, SSDs are lighter, use less power and can read and write data faster. They are also more expensive but the price difference has been narrowing as flash chips have become cheaper so SSDs are now starting to appear in some laptops. The new Samsung drive has a capacity of 64G bytes and is the same size as a conventional 1.8-inch hard-disk drive. It's designed to be used in sub-notebook class computers, ultra-mobile PCs and other devices like portable media players. Samsung said it is seeing demand increase for such products, particularly from companies making ultra portable PCs. At the Computex show in Taipei earlier this month two major contract PC makers, First International Computer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc., both showed prototype ultra portables and several other companies have already put such machines on sale. Samsung is one of the world's largest manufacturers of flash memory chips so the company has a lot to gain from SSDs becoming more popular. It estimated that the market for SSDs will increase 270 percent between now and 2010 to become the largest growth segment in the NAND flash memory market. The price of the drive, which will be sold to PC makers and not end-users, was not disclosed. Â
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Toshiba Storage Device Division today introduced new 80GB and 160GB 1.8-inch hard disks--the same size disk drives as are used in the iPod classic.
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Breaking the speed barrier of traditional flash memory, Intel and Micron Thursday announced a new flash memory architecture that increases the data transfer rates in consumer electronics by cutting the bottlenecks affecting conventional NAND flash memory.
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Solid flash-memory sales plus a good outlook for power systems are driving higher profits than Toshiba expected.
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(InfoWorld) - Eight months after recalling potentially flammable notebook PC batteries, Toshiba is again urging its customers to trade in the defective units, saying one of its notebooks caught fire on May 24. Toshiba was one of many PC vendors that recalled more than 8 million rechargeable lithium-ion batteries made by Sony. A manufacturing defect left those batteries vulnerable to short-circuiting and catching fire if they were jostled, prompting the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to issue a broad recall. Dell was the first to recall those batteriesÂ in August 2006 and was quickly followed by Apple, Lenovo, Fujitsu, Gateway, and Sony. By October 2006, that defect had led to 16 reports of notebook computer batteries overheating, causing minor property damage and two minor burns, according to the Commission. On Tuesday, Toshiba said the latest fire was sparked by a battery that was never returned. "Recently, certain instances occurred where Sony battery packs installed in Toshiba portable computers caught fire," Toshiba said in a statement on its Web site. After an investigation with Sony, Toshiba found that the battery caused "the situation," the statement said. "The original Sony Battery Pack had not been replaced as recommended by Sony and Toshiba. We put importance on the fact that the incidents that occurred involved unreplaced Sony Battery Packs, despite our ongoing replacement program." In the original recall, the Commission warned laptop users to remove the batteries immediately and to power their PCs only by plugging them into a wall outlet until receiving a free replacement battery from the PC manufacturer. Laptop users were responsible for taking the initiative to return their own batteries, leading some analysts to predict that only a small percentage would do so. Other PC vendors may face the same challenge, although the Commission does not list any other fires. Dell is continuing to replace the faulty batteries, but a spokesman said he could not produce figures for the number of batteries replaced or whether the company had noted any overheating incidents since the recall began. "The recall's going well. Customers are taking heed to send back the affected batteries and have replacements sent to them," said Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman. In response to the latest fire, Toshiba warned customers to stop using the affected batteries immediately. Users who continue running their laptops on battery power should not leave their PCs unattended while they charge and should not place PCs on a sofa, bed or other surface that could obstruct its ventilation, Toshiba said. Toshiba has not changed the list of laptops that use the affected batteries. They include various models of the company's Portege, Qosmio, Satellite, and Tecra brand PCs. As with the original recall, Toshiba will replace all affected batteries for free.
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(InfoWorld) - Higher capacity laptop computers andÂ music players could be on the way thanks to a new hard-disk drive from ToshibaÂ that manages a 25 percent jump in storage space over current models. The new 1.8-inch hard-disk drive can store 100GB of information whereas current models hold a maximum of 80GB. The drives are about the same size as a PC Card and are commonly used in music players, like Apple Computer's iPod, and compact laptop computers. Toshiba plans to start mass producing the drives in January next year. The company doesn't sell them direct to end-users but to other companies for integration into their products. In the past device makers have typically incorporated higher capacity drives quickly into their products. The drive will be on show at the Consumer Electronic Show, which takes place in Las Vegas from Jan. 8 to 11. Toshiba first developed a 1.8-inch drive in 2000. The device, which was at the time the highest capacity such drive available, could hold up to 2GB of data and cost around Â¥80,000 ($740 at the time). Today the drives have not only risen in capacity but also fallen in price to the point where an Apple iPod, which includes an 80GB drive and color screen, costs $349.
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Japan's Toshiba Corp  said it will brief on its HD DVD business and its new NAND flash memory plants at 3 a.m. EST.
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com September 27, 2004, 2:20 PM PT. Toshiba on Monday announced in Japan that it&#39;s upping the song capacity of its Gigabeat line of hard drive-based digital audio players.
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Shares surge on claim it'll ditch format Toshiba shares jumped today more six per cent today as investors voiced their approval of the company's alleged decision to abandon the HD DVD optical disc format.â¦
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A new type of flash memory that will speed access to data stored on memory cards and mobile devices has received the support of several major phone and memory vendors.
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EDGE Tech Corp (www.edgetechcorp.com), a leading supplier of DRAM and flash memory upgrades, portable computing products, storage devices, and other experience-enhancing technology solutions, announces the SD Card + USB Flash Drive Combo.