The broadening alliance between IBM Corp and Toshiba Corp extended a whole lot more yesterday when the two announced plans for a new $1,200m memory chip plant on IBM-owned land in Manassas, Virginia. IBM already has a joint venture with Toshiba manufacturing flat panel displays in Japan, Toshiba has adopted the PowerPC RISC, and is the third party to the memory chip alliance between IBM and Siemens AG in Europe. Only surprise is that IBM should be building a new chip plant when it has been shuttering or letting out space in existing ones in both the US and Europe. Toshiba says capacity of the plant, which will initially make 64M-bit memory chips, will be over 27,000 wafer starts a month, fabricating to 0.35 micron geometries and below on 8 wafers. The ventu re is expected to be established by year-end and will be jointly owned and operated by IBM and Toshiba’s Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc subsidiary. Construction of the plant is expected to begin next January with production starting in the fourth quarter of 1997, employing 1,200 at capacity. As is usual with such ventures, all output will go to the two owners, which will take the wafers, dice and package them in their own assembly plants. Analysts estimate that IBM sold $1,500m of dynamics to other computer makers last year; the company only started selling chips outside IBM in any quantities a couple of years ago. The venture will be Toshiba’s first overseas wafer fab; it has assembly plants in Malaysia.
