Playing its hot breath on IBM Corp’s neck, NEC Electronics Inc reports from Mountain View, California that it is sampling 16M-bit CMOS dynamic memory chips. The uPD4216100 and uPD4216400 (that u in the name is intended to be the Greek letter mu, but not many character sets include it) are manufactured in a 0.55 micron CMOS process and incorporate stacked capacitor storage cells for high storage capacitance and good immunity to soft errors. The parts will be 70nS, 80nS and 100nS versions and will include fast page, nibble, static column and write-per-bit modes. They operate at 5 Volts with an internal step-down to 3.3 Volts, and 2K and 4K refresh cycles are available. The first named is organised as 16M by 1 bit, the other is 4M by 4 bits. Samples are available now at $300 a time, and volume is due to begin in the fourth quarter, suggesting IBM’s supposed six-month lead may already have shrunk down to four.
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