Intel Numonyx Technology Announced

Intel and STMicroelectronics combine their flash memory businesses into a new semiconductor company called Numonyx.

Intel Corp. and STMicroelectronics announced an official deal on Monday to combine their flash memory businesses into a new semiconductor company.

The new company, named Numonyx, will occupy one of Intel's flash memory buildings in Folsom, California. More than 400 employees working at Intel's Flash Memory Group have officially joined Numonyx on Monday.

The migrated company will lease the building for at least a year while an impending decision is made to either rent space from Intel, or build or lease a separate building in the region.

The company is the third-largest non-volatile memory provider with a combined annual revenue of $3 billion and $3 billion in assets following Samsung at No. 1, Toshiba at No. 2.

Non-volatile memory is semiconductor memory that retains its data once the power is switched off.

Numonyx is focused on offering memory technology for customers that make a variety of consumer and industrial devices, including cellular phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, ultra-mobile computers and other high-tech equipment. The startup company begins as the leading provider of NOR flash memory, most commonly used in cell phones.

The company also has a considerable lineup of NAND technologies, which is found in iPods, and Numonyx is the first company to ship a new technology, called phase change memory, to customers for sampling. PCM is new technology that has fast read and write speeds at lower power than conventional flash.