Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, South Korea’s biggest chip maker and probably the world’s biggest memory chip maker, and Toshiba Corp are to join forces on development of integrated circuits for consumer electronic goods. Samsung will bring memory products and related technology to the alliance, while Toshiba will provide the technology to make non-memory integrated circuits. Samsung last year beat all its Japanese competitors to the design of a next-but-one generation 256M-bit memory chip, which it reckoned, at the time, it could have it in production by 1997 (CI No 2,490). But when all the other South Korean chip makers announced memory technology alliances with Japanese companies – Fujitsu Ltd with Hyundai Electrics Co Ltd and Hitachi Ltd with the Goldstar Electron Co Ltd unit of Goldstar Co Ltd – Samsung was left out. It looked for a short while as if an alliance would be struck with NEC Corp, but in the end the relationship has been limited to technology exchange relating to the 256M-bit memory chip. The deal with Toshiba is aimed at producing integrated circuits with better energy efficiency and greater performance for use in high-definition television and other high-tech electronics products. Samsung and Toshiba already have a technical agreement to develop 64M-bit Flash memory chips (CI No 2,646).
