While Hitachi Ltd sees heavy demand for 64M-bit memory chips in 1998 – its planned new plant is in addition to mixed 64M and 16M plants already in the plan – NEC Corp is forcing the pace to the 256M-bit generation, and is already sampling 256M synchronous dynamic random access memory chips to customers, and plans to put the things into volume production in the second half of 1998 albeit at a monthly rate of only 10,000 parts to start with. A single chip will store a full hour of compressed audio, and NEC is fabricating the things in a 0.25-micron process. A Synchronous DRAM is synchronized to input and output data in step with the clock in the central processing unit. Samples cost $2,800.
