Hitachi Ltd is keeping its chip manufacture at home and is to invest $450m in a new 16M-bit dynamic random access memory production line in Takazaki, Japan. The line will produce 1m chips a month from late 1995, probably rising to 3m by 1998 or 1999. The reason the investment is smaller than that recently announced by others is that the company is too cautious to put all its chip fabrication into a handful of big plants: it says it prefers to distribute it over a relatively large number of small bases. It has five, and told Reuter that while it thereby lost some economies of scale, it lessened the risk from natural disasters and enabled it to switch rapidly to fabricating new kinds of circuits.
