Monolithic Memories Inc, which on Thursday announced that it planned to be acquired by Advanced Micro Devices (CI No 673), had another piece of cheerful news on Friday when Fujitsu Ltd announced that it would be buying $1.2m of Monolithic’s speciality, programmable array logic, 10 times the amount it spent with the Santa Clara company last year. Fujitsu says that in response to requests from the Japanese government, overall it will raise the proportion of integrated circuits that it buys from abroad in fiscal 1987 to 12% of its total expenditure, up from 10% last year. US chipmakers have seen a big surge in orders from Japanese companies for parts for immediate delivery and there is some suspicion that the move is an attempt to make it seem that the chip pact is working.
