Motorola Inc’s decision to withdraw from the Dynamic RAM market (CI No 3,194) means Toshiba Corp, IBM Corp and Siemens AG are having to review their plans to co-develop 1G-bit DRAM dynamic random access memory chips (CI No 2,779). The Nihon Keizai Shimbun says the three remaining partners disagree on a format for the high- density chip project which began in October 1995 and was estimated to cost more than $1.5bn. The paper says the companies had decided to adopt a trench format for data storage, but Toshiba later proposed using a stack format used by other Japanese chipmakers such as NEC Corp. A final decision will be made in a year. A rival consortium made up of Hitachi Ltd, Mitsubishi Electric Corp and Texas Instruments Inc is also working jointly on the development and production of 1G-bit DRAMs (CI No 3,093). The trio agreed to share out the development costs of about $840m and also the patents, equally. They hope to start marketing the memory chips in 1999.
