Micron Will Buy Out Intel’s Share of Joint Optane Fab
Micron and Intel have had a long and apparently fairly profitable partnership over the past few years, but the two companies are moving away from each other. As announced last fall, Micron will exercise its right to buy out Intel’s share of the IM Flash Technologies fab unit in Lehi, Utah. The two companies developed several generations of NAND flash at the facility before developing Optane there as well.
The writing has been on the proverbial wall for the move for quite some time. Intel and Micron reportedly have had different ideas about where to focus as far as bringing technologies like Optane and QLC to market. The Hybrid Memory Cube the two firms teamed up to build was never particularly successful in-market and not much came of it. The two companies worked well to bring the maximum number of NAND layers up to 96, and to develop technologies like QLC (quad-level storage) NAND.
Unlike Intel, which markets its 3D XPoint memory as Optane, Micron has named its version (QuantX) but never brought products to market. At present Intel and Micron are jointly working on/through the second generation of Optane, with work on the third generation set to be completed in 2019. Past this point, the two will proceed in different directions with their own visions for the technology.
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