News and New Products

Troubled Spansion Hit by Resignations

By David Manners -- Electronics Weekly, 2/6/2006

Spansion, the flash joint venture between AMD and Fujitsu that was spun off in an IPO last December, has seen its CFO and chief administration officer resign.

CFO Steve Geiser has been replaced on an interim basis by Eric Branderiz, VP and corporate controller, while Spansion looks for a new CFO.

James Doran, formerly executive VP of worldwide operations, becomes COO.

Doran, together with Shinji Suzuki, president of Spansion Japan, will join with Spansion's CEO Dr Bertrand Cambou in comprising an “office of the CEO.”

"Now that Spansion is a public company, we must organize ourselves to deliver flawlessly with discipline and improved efficiency," said Cambou.

Spansion has struggled to find profitability in a market which has become increasingly commoditized. In Q4 2005 Spansion announced sales of $592 million on a net loss of $47.5 million.

Spansion is mainly exposed to the cut-throat NOR flash business used in code storage, where Toshiba has de-emphasized its involvement because of low prices caused by a price war initiated by Intel and the advent of low-cost producers from Taiwan.

The other, and faster growing, segment of the flash memory market, the NAND market, has seen better pricing, but Spansion did not enter the NAND market until January this year when it launched its first NAND-type product.

This was a 1Gbit device. NAND market leaders Toshiba and Samsung have 8Gbit devices on the market now and plan 16Gbit next year.

"High density is not our primary focus at this moment in time," said Jean-Marc Julia, vice-president and general manager for EMEA at Spansion, at the launch of Spansion's Ornand.

Ornand, is made using the 2bit-per-cell Mirrorbit technology based on the MNOS (metal nitride oxide semiconductor) process which Spansion co-develops with the Israeli company Saifun.

Saifun has developed a 4bit-per-cell device based on this technology. Last summer, Spansion said: "We have demonstrated the technology’s ability to store four bits per cell with a working proof-of-concept, which we refer to as QuadBit."

Asked about QuadBit, Julia replied: "Are we studying it? Yes. Are we announcing product? No. Are we announcing a partnership? No. Is it something that could be done with an existing technology or an existing partnership? Yes."

So it is possible that the Spansion NAND strategy could change to high density flash if a 4 bit-per-cell MNOS-type device becomes commercially do-able.

Electronics Weekly is the London-based sister publication of Electronics News.