Two more major players, Acer Inc and Fujitsu Ltd, are looking to exit the ailing DRAM memory market. Acer Inc’s Semiconductor Manufacturing Inc has found the new partner that it was looking for, and as suspected (CI No 3,400) it is IBM Corp. The Acer unit was known as TI-Acer until Texas Instruments Inc sold off its 33% stake to Acer back in February (CI No 3,342). Acer announced on Friday that it is to buy in logic integrated circuit technology from IBM and combine it with its own memory IC skills in order to refocus the operation away from DRAMs and towards the booming system-on-a-chip market. Acer and IBM will work to upgrade Acer’s eight-inch wafer plant in Taiwan to IBM’s 0.25 micron manufacturing technology by the end of this year, with the first logic ICs expected to roll off the production line early in 1999. By then, DRAM production will be reduced to around 20% of total output, and may be phased out altogether. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Meanwhile Fujitsu told Reuters on Friday that it was also considering a withdrawal from the DRAM market. We will take a more cautious approach towards DRAMs the company said. We will decide in future whether or not to continue the business. Mitsubishi Electric Co has already said it will be moving away from DRAM production towards custom logic chips. Only NEC Corp and Toshiba Corp are still pushing ahead with full scale DRAM production.
