And there we were thinking the next step would be to 12 wafers: nine producers of silicon wafers from Japan, the US and Germany are to form a consortium to develop 16 wafers for efficient production of larger-scale integrated circuits such as 1G-bit memory chips. Shin-Etsu Handotai Co Ltd, Wacker Siltronic GmbH, MEMC Electronic Materials Inc and six other Japanese firms including Mitsubishi Materials Corp and Sumitomo Sitix Corp are in the consortium. The consortium will be established by March 1996 and over five years will develop 16 wafers at total cost of $150m. They want Japan Inc to meet about half of the cost.
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