According to F.L. Ni, vice president of marketing at Macronix, the company’s expertise extends beyond the products they design. In particular, Macronix owns its manufacturing facilities, giving it complete control over and commitment to product quality, longevity, and supply.
This commitment is centered on four core principles: developing cost-effective and innovative products, emphasizing zero tolerance for quality defects, using the most advanced manufacturing systems, and providing comprehensive training that empower employees to design and manufacture the highest-quality products meeting customer requirements.
With regards to quality adherence, Macronix adheres strictly to ISO 9000 quality standards, including its assembly and test subcontractors that are ISO 9000-approved. Macronix created and uses its own quality-analysis system, sNOVA, that uses advanced artificial intelligence for real-time analysis of the manufacturing process, including detection, identification and correction of quality problems — for example being selected selected as the best supplier with superior quality performance for 5 consecutive years (2016 – 2020) from a global automotive-components supplier in Japan.
“The combination of these strengths allows Macronix to respond with speed and agility to the ever-evolving demands in non-volatile memory,” Ni said.
Focus on Density, Security, and Power Efficiency
“The challenges we face aren’t unusual for leaders such as Macronix, but they’re challenges nonetheless,” Ni said. “There’s tremendous demand worldwide for products like ours, a demand that continues to grow as both new markets emerge and those that are established expand, all requiring more and higher-capacity non-volatile memory solutions.”
Security, in particular, is a major concern among Macronix’s customers and end users. “We devote considerable resources to ensuring this requirement is met,” Ni noted.
Another issue, the changing density requirements, compels Macronix to focus on reducing die size and corresponding Known Good Die, or KGD, products.
“Power efficiency is also an important market driver, so we strive to meet these demands by developing products with both lower power and power-management features,” Ni explained. “Another challenge is supporting higher temperature-grade requirements, which are particularly pronounced in the automotive, industrial, and compute markets.”
To help engineers address these issues, the company offers a widest range of NOR, NAND, and ROM products in the industry—all of which feature high densities, temperature tolerance, low power, and security.
“Furthermore, we have our own system engineering team and support engineers through system-level solutions, such as software APIs and drivers,” Ni said. The system helps the company meet just about any memory need. “Our continued investments in R&D have allowed us to embrace new technologies such as 3D NAND and advance our product designs. We emphasize security, with features such as encryption and unique physical unclonable function, or PUF code. We also build power efficiency into each product we developed and have designed several families specifically for long battery life. Having full control over the products’ manufacturing [also] gives Macronix a distinct edge over its competition.”
Excellence Recognized
For its memory technology leadership, in particular its ArmorFlash, Macronix has received the Featured IoV Solution Provider and Best Memory IC of the Year awards at the inaugural EE Awards Asia.
“For decades, EE Times and EDN have been two of the most venerable names in technology publishing. We’re profoundly honored to receive this award and the recognition for our innovation that serves multiple markets. Winning it reflects the hard work and dedication of our employees and lasting commitment from our customers,” Ni said.
Over the next year, Macronix will evolve its nonvolatile solutions in step with the industry’s growing security demands.
“We’re presently developing faster, more-secure products for the automotive market—some refer to it as the Internet-of-Vehicles [IoV]—as well as for high-performance computing. And in addition to emphasizing security, these products are being designed and manufactured with the high-density, low power, and high-temperature-grade features our customers demand,” Ni concluded.
SOURCE EETimes Asia and EETimes Taiwan
