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Micron today announced that it has reached a final agreement to sell its Lehi, Utah wafer fab to Texas Instruments for US$900 million in cash. In March, Micron announced that it plans to Sell the fab, To terminate the production of the new 3D XPoint (Optane) memory technology jointly developed by it and Intel. Texas Instruments plans to deploy its own technology at the site, which means it will not be used in 3D XPoint production. Intel currently does not have any known mass production of strategically important storage/memory media, but as we all know, it produces a small amount of media for research and verification at its New Mexico plant.Intel may have to build its own production line to ensure its supply SSD based on Optane with Persistent memory DIMM Its data center customers, despite the seemingly tepid demand.
Due to sluggish demand, Micron chose to withdraw from 3D XPoint manufacturing. The company stated that “the market is not sufficiently verified to justify the continued high level of investment required to successfully commercialize 3D XPoint on a large scale.” The company recently revealed that due to insufficient demand for 3D XPoint, it lost $400 million this year alone.
Micron has reached an agreement to produce 3D XPoint for Intel (Intel named it “Optane”) by the end of 2021. Intel’s own efforts to produce Optane using 3D XPoint media have been slowly but steadily adopted in the data center but have failed in the consumer market.Therefore, Intel Discontinued production of all Optane devices for desktop computers January 2021.
For Micron, the economic value of the sale is US$1.5 billion. Texas Instruments will pay $900 million in cash for the fab, and Micron will recover an additional $600 million from the secondary sale of additional tools and other assets. Micron has arranged buyers for several of these assets, while other assets will be sold to other buyers or shipped to other Micron manufacturing bases. In addition, TI will attempt to retain all employees in Lehi, Utah after the transaction closes. Micron and Texas Instruments plan to complete the transaction before the end of the calendar year.
Intel and Micron have developed the revolutionary 3D XPoint persistent memory, which combines the speed and durability of DRAM with the durability of data storage devices. This is a secret collaboration that lasted for ten years.This The first official announcement was in 2015.
The sale of Lehi marked the end of Micron’s 3D XPoint efforts, although the company did retain intellectual property related to the technology. The company previously acquired Intel from its stake in the IMFT joint venture for $1.5 billion in 2018.Micron announced the launch of several proprietary storage devices based on 3D XPoint memory, such as QuantX with X100, But they never entered the market, making Intel the sole supplier of 3D XPoint-based products.
Micron said it will shift its focus to development support Calculation Quick Link (CXL) Standard, an open memory standard that links different memory and computing pools together.
“Micron’s Lehi, Utah facility has a long history of technological innovation and leading semiconductor manufacturing,” said Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron’s president and CEO. “We are very pleased to reach an agreement with Texas Instruments (TI) because it is an industry leader and really values the talented Lehi team and the ability that the site provides to effectively deploy its technology. We are very grateful to the Lehi team for what Micron has done Contribution, as well as the cooperation and participation of Micron and the local community.”
This is breaking news. We have contacted Intel for comments and will update as needed.
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