Japan's Sony Corp and Germany's Qimonda AG said yesterday they have agreed to form a joint venture to design high-performance DRAM memory chips for consumer and graphic applications.
The 50-50 joint venture, to be called Qreatic Design, will be based in Tokyo and is expected to start operations by the end of this year, the companies said in a joint statement.
The joint venture is expected to start with up to 30 "specialists" from Sony and Qimonda, the companies said.
Financial terms of the joint venture agreement, subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions, were not disclosed.
Their partnership highlights the growing competitiveness in making DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, chips, used in personal computers.
Sony currently buys the chips from suppliers including Elpida Memory Inc. Munich-based Qimonda is an Infineon Technologies AG unit. By partnering with Sony, Qimonda secures orders from the world's second-largest maker of consumer electronics after Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.
The capital-intensive sector has forced many of the global chip makers to seek joint ventures or form strategic alliances to share technology, design and production costs.
In 2004 Qimonda rival Hynix Semiconductor Inc of South Korea formed a joint venture with STMicroelectronics NV of Geneva.
Sony, which lost ¥10 billion from its semiconductor operations last fiscal year, is reorganizing the division. Last month, the company said it's considering various options after the Nikkei newspaper reported that Sony may sell some production lines, including those that make the Cell processors that run the PlayStation 3 game consoles, to Toshiba Corp. The division posted an operating profit in the quarter ended June 30.
In February, Sony said it will scale back investments on chips and may give up manufacturing future versions of the Cell by hiring other companies to make the semiconductors.
The company may be able to afford further investments to make TVs and digital cameras after the initial public offering of Sony's financial unit raises ¥320 billion, Japan's biggest IPO this year.
Samsung Electronics Co was the largest producer of non-computer DRAMs last year, followed by Elpida, Qimonda, Micron Technology Inc and Hynix Semiconductor, researcher Gartner Dataquest said.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by