Intel, NEC, Others To Jointly Develop Standard For Advanced DRAMs
Wednesday, December 22, 1999
TOKYO (Nikkei)--Five major Japanese, U.S., European and South Korean semiconductor memory makers reached a basic agreement on Wednesday with Intel Corp. to jointly develop advanced general-purpose DRAM chips for personal computers, sources close to the deal said.
The five are an NEC Corp. (6701)-Hitachi Ltd. (6501) alliance, Micron Technology Inc. of the U.S., Samsung Electronics Co. and Hyundai Electronics Industries Co. of South Korea, plus Infinion Technologies, a spin-off of Siemens AG.
They together control about 80% of the global DRAM market.
The partners are poised to develop next-generation models of Direct Rambus memories, which is currently one of the standard chips.
They will try to set standards for 1-gigabit DRAMS and jointly develop such models. Commercialization of such products is expected to be conducted by the participating companies possibly by the end of 2002, the sources said.
The companies are setting up a joint organization and will provide engineers for the project. They plan to collect royalties from nonparticipating firms.
The joint move is intended to share the burden of developing next-generation chips, which cost tens of billion yen to design because of the need to review basic circuitry designs, the sources added. The joint efforts will not be applied to developing larger memory capacities. Each member company will separately try to enhance the capacities of its own chips.
(The Nihon Keizai Shimbun Wednesday evening edition) |
