And a new plant producing Texas Instruments Inc memory chips in Singapore will meet about 4% of total global needs for dynamics. David Smith, tapped from Texas to be president of Tech Semiconductor Singapore Pte Ltd, told Reuters that surging demand for 4M-bit parts will make the new Singapore operation profitable by March 1994. Tech is a $330m joint venture formed by Texas with a Singapore state body and Texas’s two major memory chip buyers – Hewlett-Packard Co and Canon Inc. The Singapore plant will produce about 72,000 wafers a year for the chip from around next March. One wafer yields 520 chips and this means the Tech plant will produce 37.44m chips a year from March, more than 4% of the 800m too 900m 4Ms now being sold each year.Texas and Singapore’s Economic Development Board each own 26%, and the other two have 24% each; Texas has an option to buy out all the other shareholders in March 1996. Tech’s output is projected to rise from 4,000 wafers a month now to 6,000 by next March and 9,000 by the end of 1995, and it also has the capability to make 16M chips.Tech’s partners have also agreed to spend an extra $350m to $400m to build a new plant to make 64M and 256M memory chips from end-1997.
