NEC Corp, Toshiba Corp and Mitsubishi Electric Corp have now each announced the development of 16M-bit dynamic random access memory chips, with Toshiba saying that it applied trench architecture, while NEC and Mitsubishi have gone for stack architecture; Toshiba claims the world’s fastest access time for its part of 45nS, and says that it is 35% smaller in size than the 16M the company described last year; Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp announced that it had a prototype 16M as long ago as 1987 and Hitachi Ltd, Toshiba, and Matsushita Electronics announced parts last year, there are still several technological problems to overcome before volume production can begin – not least that the developers have got to amortise the cost of developing the upcoming 4M generation – so samples are not expected to appear till 1992.
