Strategies to the Prediction, Mitigation and Management of Product Obsolescence

5.3 NON-VOLATILE MEMORIES

This section presents an approach to forecasting the life cycle stage and the years to obsolescence of non-volatile memories (NVMs). This category includes EEPROMs and flash memories. Moreover, EPROMs and ROMs are included in this category as well, but because they contribute less than 1 percent of the 2006 memory shipments (McClean et al., 2007), they will be not discussed in this section. In 2006, the flash memories composed 92 percent of the non-volatile memory market (McClean et al., 2007). Because of that, this section will focus on flash memories. The approach discussed in this section is based on past sales data. A normal distribution is used along with part package style and bias level trend data to generate a forecast. Trends in the EEPROM and flash memory industry are discussed.

Memory is defined as non-volatile if it has the ability to retain its data irrespective of voltage fluctuations or the presence of a supply voltage (Christiansen, 1997). It is an advantage for the end user of a memory module to have memory that will function effectively without losing data in the event of a power failure or disconnection. Magnetic and optical media offer this advantage. Semiconductor memories have also been developed with this ability and are called non-volatile memories (NVMs). An ideal NVM is one that has low cost per bit, high density, fast random access, equal duration read-write and cycle times, low power consumption, operation over a wider range ...