Fujitsu Ltd is planning to invest upwards of $800m – these things don’t come cheap these days – building a new plant in which to fabricate the next two generations of dynamic memory chips, 16M-bit and 64M-bit: the plant will be Miyazaki on the southern island of Kyushu, and the wholly-owned Kyushu Fujitsu Electronics Ltd will install wafer fabrication equipment in its facility there, which presently only scribes wafers and packages the die up; the exact timing has not yet been decided but construction could start as soon as 1992 with a view to beginning fabrication of 16Ms in late 1993 or early 1994, and 64Ms following as soon as 1995 – the key to that is that several Japanese companies now reckon they can do 64Ms using existing technology rather than having to move to a new and unproven one, by using I-Line wafer steppers that emit light at wavelengths short enough to etch line widths as fine as 0.3 microns.
