For those who can remember, back in the beginning of this decade, Hynix lost $7.2 billion during the chip industry’s meltdown in 2001 and was in the brim of bankruptcy. Nobody thought Hynix could survive then. In fact, when the company rejected an acquisition offer from Micron Technology in 2002, analysts thought it was digging its own grave and Hynix’s share price hit the rock bottom. Amid the controversy, the Korean semiconductor company was bailout by state-controlled Korean banks. Surprisingly, after substantial restructuring and with unbelievable sheer determination, Hynix staged a miraculous turnaround. In a mere 3 years, it managed to return to profitability, payback most of its debt and regained the control from creditors. Even more ironically, it surpassed Micron Technology in 2005 and become the world’s second largest memory maker since then (Ref).

In the third quarter ended 30 September 2007, despite the supply glut and depressing pricing in DRAM and NAND, Hynix reported earnings of KRW 168 billion, or $182.9 million. Its sales during the quarter rose 28% to KRW 2.34 trillion ($2.55 billion) from KRW 1.82 trillion won a year earlier. In this quarter, its market share increased to 22.8%, following closely behind the world largest memory maker Samsung with a market share of 27.7%. The number 3 was Qimonda with 12.8% market share (Ref). Hynix is recognized as the world’s most cost efficient semiconductor manufacturer. In mid Nov, Hynix announced the industry’s first 1 Gigabit GDDR5 Graphics DRAM and plans to start mass production of GDDR5 in the first half of next year to meet the increasing demand for high performance graphics DRAM (Ref). Two days ago, Hynix announced a dramatic move to non-memory biz by signing a deal with Korean’s SiliconFile Technologies on CMOS image sensor. Under the deal, Hynix will manufacture and sell CMOS image sensor products using SiliconFile’s design (Ref).

Background of Hynix: Hynix was created in 1999 when Hyundai Electronics Industries absorbed LG Semiconductor under a government-sponsored industry shakeup that forced the nation’s unbridled chaebol to merge their overlapping subsidiaries and focus on sectors where they could excel. At the time, both Hyundai Electronics and LG Semicon were saddled with billions of dollars in debt. The following documentary video tells the story of Hynix in Korean.

Last week was a relatively quiet week due to US’s thanksgiving week. I was also away with my family to Hong Kong for one-week holiday. However, beneath the disguised quietness, many chip companies are aggressively initiating new product launches for the holiday season. Specifically for the graphic processor industry, NIVIDA has launched GeForce 8800 GT GPU that supports next-generation DirectX 10 games and the latest PCI Express 2.0 bus standard. The GeForce 8800 GT is powered by the new G92 GPU manufactured using TSMC 65nm process. On the other hand, AMD has also rolled out the ATI Radeon HD 3800 GPUs which also support DirectX 10.1 and PCI Express 2.0 in mid Nov. The ATI Radeon HD 3800 chips are currently manufactured using TSMC 55nm CMOS technology (Ref). AMD even bundled the newly launched quad-core Phenom CPUs together with HD 3800 GPU into the Spider PC platform (Ref). The Spider PC platform is believed to be the precursor of AMD integrated CPU/GPU Fusion chip (Ref). Another leading graphics chip leader in the market, Intel, is rumored to acquire NVIDIA in order to counter the AMD Fusion products (Ref).

One of the co-founder of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang (黃仁勳), has recently done a rare and interesting face-to-face interview with TSMC founder, Morris Chang. The interview session is shown in the following video. It is interesting to observe how close the relationship between Morris and Huang. Their relationship started way back in 1998 when NVIDIA engaged TSMC to manufacture 0.35um GPUs (Ref). I found Huang very inspiring. He was born in 1963 and founded Nivida only at the age of 30 (1993) together with two partners, Curtis Priem, and Chris Malachowsky. Under his leadership as CEO, NVIDIA is one of the fastest growing semiconductor companies in history (Ref).