ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德 科技), which is building one of the first plants to make memory chips from 300mm silicon wafers, said it revived plans to sell shares by October to help pay for the factory.
The Taiwanese unit of Infineon Technologies AG of Germany said it has yet to decide on the details of the US$200 million overseas sale, which may combine new shares and old ones that are held by its Taiwan affiliate, Mosel Vitelic Inc (茂矽科技).
"We expect to appoint an investment bank to arrange the sale by mid-July," said Albert Lin (林育中), a spokesman for the company. The share sale should coincide with a rebound in the prices of memory chips, he said.
By the first quarter of next year, the plant will start mass production, said ProMOS. That will make it the second memory-chipmaker after parent Infineon to produce the dinner-plate-sized wafers, which more than double the number of chips that are yielded from standard 200-mm wafers.
ProMOS expects the new plant to cut production cost by up to a fifth by the second half of next year.
The current spot market price of a 64-megabit PC100 dynamic random access memory chip is about US$1.80, less than the cost of production for most manufacturers.
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