FOCUS-Rambus's memory chip customers producing, stock soars
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 29 (Reuters) - Rambus Inc. announced that two more memory chip companies are producing chips based on its memory-enhancing technology in volume, fueling a 25 percent surge in its rebounding stock on Tuesday.
Shares of the Mountain View, Calif.-based chip designer soared 60-5/8 to close at 301-5/8, a record high for the company that develops a chip connection technology used to speed up the performance of computers and communications products. Its shares had previously traded at a 52-week low of 51-1/2.
Rambus said that two big memory chip manufacturers, Korea's Hyundai Corp. and Siemens AG spinoff Infineon Technologies , soon to be floated on the U.S. market, will begin volume production of its chips after completing component and system level validation tests.
Rambus said these companies will join Samsung Electronics Co Ltd , NEC Corp. and Toshiba Corp. , who are all beginning volume production of Rambus memory products. Rambus said these five manufacturers are expected to deliver more than ten million RDRAM (Rambus Dynamic Random Access Memory) devices by the end of this quarter.
"The market seems to have gone gaga over that," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64, a semiconductor consulting firm in Saratoga, Calif. "This (ten million units) is a veritable drop in the bucket compared with the total worldwide memory chip market of 500 million units...But it's a start."
Rambus's shares began their recent tear a few weeks ago during Intel Corp.'s Developer Forum, where the world's largest chip maker voiced its continued support of the RDRAM technology, which is used in some of Intel's high-end chip sets that accompany some versions of its Pentium III processors.
Rambus shares were under a cloud last year, when a technical glitch delayed the launch of the Intel chip sets last September, the first products to implement Rambus's memory enhancing technology. RDRAM allows a computer's memory to keep pace with faster generations of microprocssors, controllers and graphics.
Analysts also noted that Rambus's stock has been popular among short-sellers, who buy a stock on margin in anticipation that its shares will fall, and they attributed some of Tuesday's jump to short sellers covering their positions.
According to the NASDAQ, the short interest in Rambus in the month of February was 8.8 million shares, out of a total of 25.2 million diluted shares outstanding, as of the company's last earnings report in January.
reh
ps: don't forget MDIX |
