Figuring the worldwide glut of memory chips means that market doesn’t look like a good way of making a living anytime soon, Oki Electric Industry Co Ltd is going to re-focus its semiconductor business on large-scale system-on-a-chip devices while cutting back its dependency on memory products. By instituting a cross- company Oki Silicon Platform Architecture, the company hopes its discrete telecoms and computer systems divisions will begin to collaborate on new generations of integrated products for individual requirements, especially in voice and picture processing for PCs. The Advanced RISC Machines Ltd licensee says the ARM RISC core will be key to its plans, expecting to put the design into boards alongside Flash RAM and telecommunications ASICs for a range of mobile devices. It says it’s going to work with ARM on future enhancements to the RISC. Oki hopes to grow its semiconductor business to from $1.33bn now to $1.56bn in 2000 but reduce revenue from memory to a third – $520m – from $665m or half of the total now. Capital investment in semiconductors will fall by around 40% to $156m over the period; there will be no new capital investment in DRAM technology this year. Revenue from large-scale circuit production is expected to rise from $156m to $548m by 2000.
