Qimonda Richmond LLC, a US semiconductor-making unit of Infineon Technologies AG, filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors, blaming the drop in global demand for computer chips.
The company, based in Sandston, Virginia, listed more than US$1 billion in both assets and debt in Chapter 11 documents filed on Friday in US Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware. Qimonda North America Corp also filed for bankruptcy on Friday, court papers showed.
Qimonda is an affiliate of Qimonda AG, which is also a unit of Infineon. Qimonda AG, which primarily makes dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, for personal computers, filed for protection from creditors on Jan. 23 in Europe after failing to get sufficient financing following losses on memory-chip prices that have dropped below production costs.
Qimonda Richmond said it was forced to file for bankruptcy after its parent Qimonda AG filed for insolvency. The company said Qimonda AG stopped buying its inventory, resulting in a lack of funds to continue operations, court documents said.
“Toward the end of March 2007, prices for DRAM products fell precipitously,” Qimonda North America chief financial officer Miriam Martinez said in court filings.
The drop was a result of weak seasonal demand, coupled with computer manufacturers stockpiling inventory in anticipation of the release of Microsoft Corp’s Windows Vista operating system.
Average DRAM prices plummeted 85 percent in 2007 and fell an additional 58 percent last year, Martinez said in court papers, citing the market research firm DRAMeXchange.
Qimonda said it plans to “locate a purchaser expeditiously” for substantially all of its assets. The company will finance operations with about US$10.3 million in cash while in bankruptcy, court papers showed.
In related news, Spansion Inc, the money-losing maker of memory chips for mobile phones, said it failed to make an interest payment on US$266 million of bonds, which it now must repay in full.
Spansion first missed a payment on the notes on Jan. 15, and then failed to make good by the 30-day “cure” deadline, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said in a regulatory filing on Friday.
Spansion’s Japanese subsidiary filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this month. The parent company is in talks with holders of US$625 million of bonds due in 2013 about restructuring the debt and a possible sale or merger.
Spansion is the world’s largest producer of NOR flash, once the most common type of memory chip used in mobile phones before handset makers turned to cheaper NAND flash chips manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co and Toshiba Corp.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
RSS