Samsung Electronics Co Ltd’s new memory chip wafer fab in Austin, Texas is becoming a sought-after property and could end up costing the South Korean very much less than the $1,300m budgeted for it. Intel Corp has already agreed to take a 50% stake in the plant, and now Electronic Buyers News hears that Toshiba Corp is talking with Samsung about acquiring a 20% stake in the wafer fab in return for 20% of the output of 64M-bit memory chips. Toshiba, which currently has all of its chip plants in expensive Japan, said no decision has been made on an investment in the Samsung fab. Toshiba was the inventor of the Flash memory chip, and Samsung already licenses Toshiba’s NAND-type Flash memory manufacturing technology.
