Infineon: The Qimonda Challenge

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author In the last part of this series, we looked at Infineon’s recent financials and pointed out that Qimonda is a key reason why the company is struggling to create more shareholders’ value. Let us now take a deeper look into Qimonda’s challenges and Infineon’s strategic initiatives to address the situation.

Infineon: Company Overview

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author We have, over the past year, presented detailed valuation theses for various mobile chipset vendors namely Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, InterDigital, Marvell and STMicroelectronics. This matrix will not be complete without Infineon – the German Chipmaker.

Pioneering Change in the Memory Market: MetaRam Visionary Fred Weber (Part 6)

SM: You have market potential to build a pretty big business. Is that what you want to do? FW: I want to build a profitable and sustainable business. We do not want to grow too fast. Our strategy is to have the right technology, the right architecture and the right product mix in the right

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Pioneering Change in the Memory Market: MetaRam Visionary Fred Weber (Part 5)

SM: You have been doing this for two years, where are you in terms of products? FW: We don’t produce the DIMM, we produce controller chips. We sell controller chips to DIMM makers. Our partners today are Smart Modular Technologies and Hynix. They take their DRAM, put it on a board with our chips to

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Pioneering Change in the Memory Market: MetaRam Visionary Fred Weber (Part 4)

SM: How does MetaRam fit your golden rules? FW: I often say the main rule golden rule is “CPUs should talk directly to DRAMs is because that is how God intended it to be, and you should not get in the middle of it”! That is why it can be surprising when you look at

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Pioneering Change in the Memory Market: MetaRam Visionary Fred Weber (Part 3)

SM: Chip design does not have to be a labor intensive process. FW: No it doesn’t, but it can be. You can very easily apply too many people. You need a lot of people for complex chips, so there is always a temptation to use too many people. The problem is you then run into

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Pioneering Change in the Memory Market: MetaRam Visionary Fred Weber (Part 2)

SM: What was significant about your time at AMD for both yourself and the industry? FW: It was a time that brought about the absolute consolidation and predominance of microprocessors. In the 1980’s the RISC processors and single chip processors where gaining importance but there were still mainframes in multiple architectures. By the mid 90’s

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Pioneering Change in the Memory Market: MetaRam Visionary Fred Weber (Part 1)

One trend occurring over the past decade is a reduction in the overall innovation by entrepreneurs in the semiconductor space. With the roll out of multi-core processors it is obvious that chokepoints in processing speed are going to lie in places like the bus and memory. That is where MetaRam comes into play. A small

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