Japan's Fujitsu to cut back conventional DRAM production
TOKYO, Jan 11 (AFP) - Japanese electronics giant Fujitsu Ltd. said Monday it will cut back production of its memory chips in the face of a crumbling market and falling profits.
Fujitsu decided to scale down production of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips after forecasting its microchip division will lose 90 billion yen (800 million dollars) in the year to March, a company spokeswoman said.
"By scaling down the level of mass production of conventional DRAMs, we will shift more resources to strengthen system LSI (large-scale integrated) circuits production," the spokeswoman said.
System LSIs group memory and logic functions on one chip and are widely used in the home electronics market, including digital cameras.
Fujitsu will halt production of all benchmark 64-megabit DRAMs at domestic and US plants by the end of the year, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said, although the company spokeswoman denied the report.
In December, Fujitsu and Toshiba Corp. announced they would work together on a more powerful next-generation one-gigabit DRAM chip using 0.13-micron level technology.
The Fujitsu spokeswoman said the company's decision to cut back DRAM production "will not affect our alliance with Toshiba at all."
She also denied a report that Fujitsu, Toshiba and Sony Corp. would jointly develop microchips, saying: "We have separate contracts with each company, as far as I know there is no three-way alliance."
Fujitsu and Sony agreed January last year to jointly develop system LSIs, she said. |
