Local memory chipmaker Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦電子) yesterday said it had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Japan’s top memory company, Elpida Memory Inc, to supply memory chips for PCs, game consoles and digital TVs that handle massive graphic processing.
Under the terms of the MOU, Winbond will also secure next-generation technology from Tokyo-based Elpida to manufacture graphics double-data-rate (GDDR) memory chips and other special memory chips, company spokesman Wilson Wen (溫萬壽) said by telephone.
“Elpida will become our new technology source after our partner Qimonda AG stopped developing and providing next-generation GDDR technology,” Wen said.
Winbond hopes to make GDDR chips using more advanced technologies than the 70-nanometer and 65-nanometer technologies from Qimonda that it is using in a pilot run, he said.
“More importantly, we will be allowed to make our own-brand GDDR chips using Elpida’s technology in the future, which will bring extra business for us,” Wen said.
The partnership with Elpida will help Winbond expand into new and less volatile businesses from its standard PC memory business — commodity dynamic random access memory (DRAM) — which accounted for one-third of its NT$5.69 billion (US$176 million) in revenues last quarter.
GDDR chips, which are incorporated into graphic cards, are designed to handle demanding graphic processing at high speeds.
From the first quarter of next year, Winbond will supply a small volume of GDDR chips to Elpida, Wen said.
In a rarely seen move, Winbond raised NT$5.2 billion (up from an earlier estimate of NT$3.1 billion), or 68 percent of its capital spending for this year, to partly fund the purchase of new equipment for manufacturing GDDR chips.
Elpida’s partnership with Winbond came after the Japanese chipmaker inked an agreement with local DRAM chipmaker ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德科技) last week to outsource production of the latest generation of mass-market memory chips, known as DDR3, on its technologies.
Winbond shares surged 6.15 percent yesterday to close at NT$7.25, out-performing the benchmark TAIEX’s nearly 1 percent rise.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts