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To: Mr. Aloha who wrote (252)	12/8/1997 12:25:00 PM
From: Paul Dieterich	Read Replies (1) of 582

Is There Life After DRAM Crash For Japan's Chip Makers? techweb.com excerpts: (12/08/97; 11:00 a.m. EST) By Jack Robertson, Semiconductor Business News Japanese chip makers have only one question these days: They want to know if there is life after the market crash in DRAMs.... The Japanese are also jumping belatedly into the DRAM shrink race to cut their costs. They were shocked earlier this year by Micron Technology, when the Boise, Idaho, company roared past them this year in DRAM volumes and earnings by shrinking its DRAM die size by shifting to 0.35-micron production lines, thus doubling the number of chips from a wafer. But the Japanese will have to play catch up. Micron said it expects to get another 50 percent increase in the number of DRAM die on a single wafer when it goes to a 0.3-micron process by the end of this year. Most of the Japanese chip makers had slowed their push to quarter-micron processing and were working on the new technology only for the next-generation 64-megabit lines. This meant many of their mainstay 16-megabit fabs were running on 0.5-micron lines that were highly vulnerable to the shrink efforts at Micron and other competitors. But now Japanese vendors are rushing to catch up by using newer processes and even quarter-micron lines to turn out lower cost 16-megabit DRAMs. Japan's domestic market hasn't helped chip makers either. The pump-priming strategy by "Japan Inc." for the home market was judged to be a failure for chip makers. The consumer electronics market driver is stalled now. And the market that Japanese IC makers were really counting on this year -- domestic PCs -- went into a tailspin in May. "The PC market in Japan dropped sharply" said Kazunari Shirai, president of Fujitsu's LSI Manufacturing Group. "This caused a sudden decline in domestic demand for DRAMs and other PC components."

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