Toshiba Corp, the world's No. 2 chipmaker, said it may build a new semiconductor plant equipped with the most advanced chipmaking machinery.
"We are considering building a plant that uses 300mm wafers," company spokesman Kenichi Sugiyama said in response to a report carried by Nikkei English News.
"The cost, the time, place and what kinds of chips haven't been decided," Sugiyama said.
Tokyo-based Toshiba may spend about ?200 billion (US$1.7 billion) to build the new 300mm plant, the Nikkei report said, citing unidentified company officials.
Most conventional chip plants process silicon wafers of 200mm in size.
Silicon wafers are the material from which chips are cut.
Increasing wafer size lowers production costs by boosting the number of chips that can be cut from a single piece of silicon.
Toshiba shares rose as much as 4.6 percent to ?321, and were at ?320 as of 1:12pm Tokyo time on Japanese stock exchanges.
The chipmaker is already boosting production of some chips for which demand is the greatest.
The company said yesterday it will increase production of flash-memory chips as demand rises for mobile phones equipped with digital cameras that need to store large volumes of data.
At the same time, the company is lowering production of other types of memory chips, especially those used in personal computers since demand for PCs remains weak.
Toshiba is reducing capacity for dynamic random-access memory chips and static random-access memory chips at its Yokkaichi plant in central Japan, spokesman Makoto Yasuda said.
The company will use the production lines to make more flash-memory chips. DRAM and SRAM production will be shifted to a plant in Oita Prefecture in western Japan.
Sales of flash-memory chips, which retain data even when the power is switched off, is rising as users snap up handsets equipped with cameras. Japan Telecom Holdings Co, the first to introduce camera phones a year and a half ago, said yesterday more than half of its users subscribed to its camera-phone service in the six months ended Sept. 30.
Toshiba wants to raise its share of the market for flash-memory chips to 50 percent from about 40 percent at present, the Nihon Keizai newspaper reported earlier said.
South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co dominates the market for a type of flash memory called NAND with a 50 percent share.
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