Renesas withdraws from flash memory market

The gradual withdrawal was announced one year ago by Chairman and CEO Saturo Ito with a prediction that flash memory sales would comprise about 10 percent of revenue in the 2007 financial year.

"We stopped development of 4Gbit and higher with a plan for total withdrawal in FY 08," said Matthew Trowbridge, CEO of Renesas Technology Europe. He added that due to continued weakness of the flash memory pricing, standalone flash memory contributed 5 percent of Renesas FY 07 revenue of 950.5 billion yen (about $9.2 billion).

Trowbridge stressed that whereas some companies might have tried to sell the operation or simply closed it down laying off staff, Renesas chose to put the resources to work on flash MCUs and SoC engineering and design.

- Peter Clarke
EE Times Europe