Qimonda (2006 - 2009)

2006 - 2009

dead europe

infineon moved its memory business into a separate company in 2006 and listed it in new york three months later, arriving just as dram prices fell eighty five percent in one year and another fifty eight percent in the next. qimonda built good chips on a deep trench cell nobody else used, which counts for nothing when the product sells below what it costs to make. a rescue worth 325 million euros was agreed in december 2008 and came apart inside a month. the filing went to a munich court on 23 january 2009 and twelve thousand people lost their jobs.

» see qimonda.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Nobody ever put Qimonda in a forum signature. to be fair, on the Turkish hardware boards in the mid 2000s you listed your processor and whatever brand was printed on your memory sticks. that brand was Kingston or Corsair (name escapes me). to be honest. The company that actually made the silicon inside those sticks stayed invisible on purpose, one layer below the part of the market that has fans. but yeah, qimonda spent its entire short life down there and then died in public (close enough).

Infineon carved its memory division out into a separate company on 1 may '06 and floated it on the New York Stock Exchange that august. The timing reads now like something outta a warning label. to be honest. Memory is the most brutal business in semiconductors because every maker sells the same commodity part. when supply runs ahead of demand there is nothing to compete on except price. back then. price goes to zero. by then. anyway, DRAM prices fell eighty five percent during 2007, they fell another fifty eight percent during 2008 (name escapes me).

i was not paying attention by then, but anyway. look, at its height in 2007 the company employed around thirteen and a half thousand people and was among the largest DRAM makers on earth. for some reason. Its technology was genuinely its own: a deep trench storage cell that the rest of the industry had abandoned, leaking less current and drawing roughly a third less power, which mattered for anything running on a battery. back then. look, then the buried wordline work in '08 promised to make the whole thing cheaper to manufacture (cant remember the exact year). None of it arrived in time to matter.

~ the chronicle ~

Born	1 may 2006, spun out of Infineon
Peak	about 13,500 employees in 2007, second largest DRAM maker at formation
Killed	23 january 2009
Lifespan	two years and eight months
Made by	Infineon Technologies
Killed by	a DRAM price collapse, then a rescue that fell apart

~ the decline ~

this happened more in the english speaking internet than where i was. Revenue for the 2008 financial year came in at 1.79 billion euros against 3.61 billion the year before. for some reason. In october 2008 the company announced roughly three thousand redundancies. In december the New York Stock Exchange sent notice that the listing no longer met its standards because the market capitalization had fallen under a hundred million dollars. more or less. the shares had touched five cents in november.

i saw this from a distance, mostly. look, a rescue was assembled on december 2008 and it was sort of a genuinely serious one, 325 mil euros of credit with the German federal government standing behind a further 280 mil in guarantees. but yeah, infineon added seventy five million to a company it had already let go of once. The state of Saxony put in 150 mil because Dresden is in Saxony and Dresden is where the fab was. Within weeks the pieces stopped fitting together while the last hundred million was still being argued over (or whatever it was called). anyway. Qimonda filed in a Munich court on 23 january 2009.

~ what got buried with it ~

this part you had to be in the US for, and i honestly was not (cant remember the exact year). More than twelve thousand jobs went, including about thirty two hundred in Dresden and eighteen hundred in Porto. The Dresden plant was idled on march 2009 and the Richmond fab in Virginia closed on 1 april, taking another fifteen hundred people with it. Richmond is a data center now, run by somebody else, on a site built to make memory chips.

this part i was not really around for, but anyway. The patents were sold off and Micron ended up with a large share of them. though, the deep trench and buried wordline work did not vanish either, it got licensed onward. some of it turned up years later inside the Chinese DRAM industry that Europe had by then stopped competing with (if memory serves). Germany went from owning a top-tier memory manufacturer to owning none in under three years. it has not had one since.

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