Toshiba Corp is planning to buy IBM Corp’s half of their joint DRAM venture, Dominion Semiconductor LLC, for between $165m to $250m, according to Toshiba sources. Japanese daily the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reports that the deal will be announced today and could be closed by the end of the year.
Toshiba plans to partner with Fujitsu Ltd to produce next-generation memory chips. The two teamed up to develop 1Gb DRAM late last year and announced that they were working on fast-cycle random access memory (FCRAM) in February. However, both companies recently announced losses for 1998, which were blamed on poor results from their semiconductor divisions.
For IBM the deal marks another stage in its phased withdrawal from the tempestuous DRAM market. Although the company still has memory manufacturing facilities around the world, it has concentrated on the more profitable system-on-a-chip and custom logic market of late. The sale of Dominion, which was founded in 1996, marks another seismic shift in the memory market. Recently, major manufacturers – NEC Corp and Hitachi Ltd among others – have been combining operations to try and fight the spiraling costs of developing next-generation DRAMs.
