Motorola Inc formally confirmed yesterday that it is joining the memory chip design co-operative of IBM Corp, Toshiba Corp and Siemens AG for the 1G-bit memory generation, and more significantly added Siemens to the other two as a bilateral partner. Already teamed with Toshiba in a logic and memory chip joint venture in Japan, and with IBM Corp in the PowerPC alliance and on IBM’s X-ray synchrotron, it is now forming a joint venture with Siemens to build a new equally-owned memory chip plant in the US for $1,500m. The plant will make 64M-bit and 256M-bit memory chips. Construction will begin next year and production is slated for 1998. It’s not the plant that Motorola is building outside Richmond, Virginia: no location has been chosen. On the 1G-bit part, Motorola pepole will join development teams from IBM, Siemens and Toshiba working on high-density chips at IBM’s Advanced Semiconductor Research and Development Center.
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