Developing new generations of memory chips is now so expensive that with the straitened capital market in Tokyo, even Japanese companies are having to seek partners to help defray the cost. Yesterday, IBM Corp and its memory chip partner Siemens AG came together with Toshiba Corp to announce that they would work as a trio at IBM Corp’s East Fishkill, New York facility to develop 256M-bit memory chips for the late 1990s. Siemens, which got into the leading edge memory chip business using 1M-bit technology licensed from Toshiba, is developing 16M and 64M parts with IBM. The agreement does not at this stage include joint manufacturing of the resulting 256M-bit 0.25 micron parts, although IBM says that by the time it needs to fit out a plant to fabricate the devices, the cost will have risen to $1,000m on top of the $1,000m it will cost to develop the 256M part. IBM has also excluded its X-ray lithography technology – using a synchrotron from Oxford Instruments Plc – which it is sharing with Motorola Inc – from the new agreement. The latest agreement adds yet another area in which IBM and Toshiba are in each other’s pocket – IBM already buys memory chips from Toshiba for use in its 9121 mainframes rather than using its own; it has a joint venture company with Toshiba making active matrix colour displays, and Toshiba is to join IBM and Time Warner Inc on multimedia developments – all of which suggests that IBM will be trying to wean Toshiba away from Sun Microsystems Inc and the Sparc in the workstation business, and over to RS/6000.
