Motorola Inc may now be regretting it, but its White Oak Semiconductor joint venture with Siemens AG Semiconductor Group began production last month of 64-megabit dynamic RAM chips at the new plant near Richmond, Virginia. The plant went up on a green field site in eleven months. Pioneer-Standard Electronics Inc, the Cleveland, Ohio-based company which says it is Digital Equipment Corp’s largest distributor, supplied White Oak with DEC AlphaServer 8200 VMScluster systems, while Toronto, Canada-based Promis Systems Inc provided manufacturing execution software for the systems. White Oaks will emply between 1,000 and 1,500 people at the facility once full production starts. It is designed for fully integrated wafer manufacturing, assembly and final testing. Motorola announced that is was withdrawing from the Dynamic RAM market last July (CI No 3,194), and is expected to use its part of the White Oak venture for fast, static RAMs.
v
