Hitachi Ltd, Mitsubishi Electric Corp and Hitachi’s long-standing memory chip partner Texas Instruments Inc have agreed to joint development and production of 1G-bit dynamic random access memory chips, the Nippon Keizai Shimbun reported. The trio have agreed to share out the development costs of about $840m and also the patents, equally. They hope to start marketing the memory chips – which will each store a phenomenal 128Mb – in 1999. The firms had been independently developing 1G-bit DRAM chips, but decided to join forces to limit the soaring development costs, the paper said.
