The Japanese Ministry of International Trade & Industry is considering a project involving one US and one German and nine Japanese electronics makers to develop silicon wafers for next-generation dynamic random access memory chips. They will together invest $180m to research and develop a silicon wafer with a 40-centimeter – 15.7 – diameter. If the project is approved, the firms will set up a joint venture by the end of this year and embark on the seven-year project in the year starting April 1 1995. The Ministry will hold a 70% stake in the venture, investing about $126m. The new wafer will enable semiconductor makers to triple output from a single wafer while reducing costs by half. The nine Japanese companies expected to join the project include Toshiba Ceramics Co Ltd and the silicon-producing subsidiaries of Shin-Etsu Chemical Co Ltd and Mitsubishi Materials Corp. The foreign firms are MEMC Electronic Materials Inc of the US and the Wacker-Chemie GmbH arm of Germany’s Hoechst AG.
