When I was really young, I used to play a card game called “Pit” where you tried to corner the market on a particular commodity like oranges, sugar, soybeans, or corn. The game was based on the trading pits of the commodities exchanges and the goal is to get as many people as possible screaming for commodities trades. (Parker Brothers still offers the 98-year-old card game and you can get a copy from Amazon for $6.99.)
What does this have to do with memory? It looks to me as though SK Hynix is playing its own version of Pit with respect to non-volatile memory. The company just announced a partnership with IBM to commercialize phase-change memory (PCM, also called PCRAM). That announcement comes on the heels of a joint MRAM development agreement with Toshiba announced less than a year ago and an announcement in 2010 that SK Hynix and HP on joint work to commercialize memristor-based memory.
According to most market-share analysis reports on the Web (including this one from weSRCH), SK Hynix is the number four vendor of Flash memory in the world after Samsung, Toshiba, and Micron. It looks like SK Hynix is determined to become the leader in the successor to NAND Flash memory, no matter what that technology will be.
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