Qimonda

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

~ the goodbye ~

Nobody ever put Qimonda in a forum signature. On the Turkish hardware boards in the mid 2000s you listed your processor and whatever brand was printed on your memory sticks, and that brand was Kingston or Corsair. 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. Qimonda spent its entire short life down there and then died in public.

Infineon carved its memory division out into a separate company on 1 may 2006 and floated it on the New York Stock Exchange that august. The timing reads now like something out of a warning label. Memory is the most brutal business in semiconductors because every maker sells the same commodity part, so when supply runs ahead of demand there is nothing to compete on except price, and price goes to zero. DRAM prices fell eighty five percent during 2007. They fell another fifty eight percent during 2008.

At its height in 2007 the company employed around thirteen and a half thousand people and was among the largest DRAM makers on earth. 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. Then the buried wordline work in 2008 promised to make the whole thing cheaper to manufacture. None of it arrived in time to matter.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the decline ~

Revenue for the 2008 financial year came in at 1.79 billion euros against 3.61 billion the year before. 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, and the shares had touched five cents in november.

A rescue was assembled on 21 december 2008 and it was a genuinely serious one, 325 million euros of credit with the German federal government standing behind a further 280 million in guarantees. The state of Saxony put in 150 million because Dresden is in Saxony and Dresden is where the fab was. Infineon added seventy five million to a company it had already let go of once. Within weeks the pieces stopped fitting together while the last hundred million was still being argued over. Qimonda filed in a Munich court on 23 january 2009.

~ what got buried with it ~

More than twelve thousand jobs went, including about thirty two hundred in Dresden and eighteen hundred in Porto. The Dresden plant was idled on 13 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.

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

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