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To: Jill who wrote (7728)	10/6/1999 5:40:00 PM
From: Ruffian	Respond to of 54805

NEC Halts Rambus Chips> NEC halts Rambus-based chips By Bloomberg News Special to CNET News.com October 6, 1999, 2:15 p.m. PT Tokyo--NEC, Japan's largest chipmaker, said it will temporarily suspend production of Rambus dynamic random-access memory chips after Intel delayed a product that works with Rambus's technology. NEC has already switched production lines in Southern Japan and Scotland to produce synchronous DRAM memory chips rather than the Direct Rambus chips--which are capable of faster data transfer than conventional computer memory chips--they were making before, said a company spokesman who asked not to be named. The Tokyo-based company had planned to ship about 2 million Rambus chips monthly to PC makers from March. NEC's decision comes after Intel, the world's No. 1 chipmaker, last month said it would delay for a second time a product that uses Rambus chips because of a technical problem. The product, a chipset, is a group of chips that work with a microprocessor to form the main brain of a personal computer. Santa Clara, California-based Intel, which backs Rambus's chip architecture technology, is still looking into problems with the Rambus-based Camino chipset, which acts as an intermediary between the computer's processor and its memory. Intel isn't saying when it might reschedule the release, forcing NEC and others to alter their production plans. The world's biggest memory chipmakers, Samsung of South Korea and Micron Technology, said yesterday they are planning to refit plants so they can switch to synchronous DRAM output. The delay has also led No. 2 computer maker Hewlett-Packard to put off shipping the latest models of its Vectra corporate PC and Kayak workstation. Toshiba, Japan's second-largest chipmaker, said Intel's chipset delay won't affect its production plans because it only makes Rambus DRAM chips for Sony's PlayStation 2 home video game player, due to go on sale early next year. ''We make them mainly for Sony's Playstation, and not for PCs, so our demand situation won't change,'' said Toshiba spokesman Kenichi Sugiyama. Toshiba, which started producing Rambus chips last month, makes about 500,000 units a month at present and aims to expand output to 1 million units by the end of the year. Intel has promoted Rambus's chip architecture technology with the intention of making it an industry standard that would support its newest microprocessors. Recently Intel said it would support an interim technology, PC-133, until Rambus is ready. Several memory-chip makers have proposed exploring a type of memory setup called Double Data Rate SDRAM. Though a standard for that architecture doesn't exist, the longer Rambus takes to ramp up, the greater the threat to Rambus, analysts said. Copyright 1999, Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved. FREE Newsletter sample >