Powerchip Semiconductor Corp (
The comment followed a report by the Chinese-language Economic Daily News claiming that Powerchip could jointly build a chip factory with one of the Japanese chipmakers. The newspaper didn't say where it had obtained this information.
"We're currently busy planning our Taiwan facilities, so we don't have resources to focus on other projects presently," Eric Tang (譚仲民), a spokesman for Hsinchu-based Powerchip, said by telephone yesterday.
"We're considering every possibility," he said, calling the report "speculation."
Powerchip has alliances with Elpida and Renesas to reduce rising production and development costs as mobile phones, music players and digital TVs demand smaller, more powerful chips. The company last week said it will design semiconductors with Renesas and a month earlier agreed to build a ?1.6 trillion (US$13 billion) factory in Taiwan with Elpida.
Renesas, Japan's second-largest chipmaker, denied the report.
The Tokyo-based company last month bought 37 percent of Retronix Technologies Inc, a Powerchip unit that makes non-memory chips used in electronics, for NT$350 million (US$11 million).
"We are cooperating with Powerchip on development and we outsource some of our production to them," said a Renesas spokesman, who declined to be named. "We see no possibility of building an 8-inch wafer factory together in China."
Tomoko Kobayashi, a spokeswoman for Elpida, Japan's biggest maker of memory for computers and consumer electronics, said the company had no such plans.
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