I believe many articles about Spansion’s Chapter 11 are missing the point of the real reason for the failure of Spansion. The key reason is that in the non volatitle market the NOR is on a shrinking growth rate pace compared to NAND’s accelerating growth rate. As a result, the semiconductor companies that focused on NAND have been growing faster and have been more profitable than the ones that focused on NOR. The current global economic upheaval is just accelerating this trend.
Spansion is on the ropes as NAND supercedes NOR
This phenomena is mainly due to NOR’s higher cost and smaller memory size relative to NAND at every semiconductor technology node. A similar development took place in the SRAM and DRAM memory market in the past. SRAM and DRAM unit volume used to be equal in size, but as a result of DRAM being cheaper with a larger memory size, its current market size is about 10X the size of SRAM memory (even though SRAM is faster).
This growth trend in the volume of products and applications that use NAND and not NOR has been accelerating for several years. See the article below about the trouble that Intel had in selling NOR memories from May 2007.
This column was written by Ron Maltiel, a litigation consultant and a guest blogger at TechPulse 360. More information about Ron can be found at his Web site.
Posted by Mark Boslet 
