With Goldstar Co Ltd already in bed with Hitachi Ltd on memory chips, Hyundai Ltd late last year joined forces with Fujitsu Ltd, leaving Samsung Electronics Co as the apparent wallflower (CI No 2,271). Samsung is in fact the biggest chipmaker among the South Koreans, and it has now decided to ally with Japan’s biggest chipmaker, NEC Corp, on development of the 256M-bit generation of memory chips. The companies are to exchange information about the design of the basic memory cells used to make up the chips, which are expected to start appearing in 1998. Both firms already have prototypes, but they use different memory cell designs. The co-operation could lead to full joint development of the chips if it goes well, NEC said. IBM Corp, Toshiba Corp and Siemens AG are allied on 256Ms, and Hitachi with Texas Instruments Inc.
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