Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd and Mitsubishi Electric Corp have agreed to work together on developing 1Gb dynamic random access memory (DRAM). The announcement signals a trend in the race towards commercializing 1Gb DRAMs. Earlier this month, Toshiba Corp and Fujitsu Ltd announced that they would collaborate on DRAM R&D, hoping to speed the time to market and cut the costs of the next generation memory technology (CI No 3,552). There is fierce competition among the major manufacturers to be first to market with the 1Gb components. Toshiba and Fujitsu plan to ship their first chips by 2002, but Matsushita and Mitsubishi claim that they will launch products from the collaboration by 2000. Reuters reports that the companies are also conducting a feasibility study on working together to develop system-on-a-chip large scale integrated circuits.
