News

posted on 28 July 2008 12:06

Numonyx, borne in hope for months ago, is suffering from financial red ink disease and cutting jobs and travel.

The dollar's weakness against the Israeli shekel has made Numonyx' Kiryat Gat, Israel, fabrication plant costs much higher on the world stage. Burdened with this and by chronic over-capacity in the flash memory market, Numonyx has set out on a cost-cutting drive.

It is firing several dozen contract workers and, in a tangible demonstration of how tight things are, cutting overseas travel. This is such a comparatively trivial sum. It is ironic too as Numonnyx has just opened a global distribution centre in Singapore. 

Numonyx came into being in March as a venture built from some of Intel's flash interests and those of STMicroelectronics. At the time CEO Brian Harrison said: "It is rare when a company starts in such a strong position,” which turned out to be a generally true statement but specifically untrue for Numonyx. It really is rare.

The hope is that the present troubles are growing pains on the way to a glorious future of post-NAND and post-NOR memory production using its developing Phase Change Memory (PCM) technology.

However there are competing MRAM and STT-RAM technologies which also combine the speed of DRAM and the non-volatitility of flash. This is a long and hard road Numonyx is embarked upon and its successful outcome is in doubt.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}