News

posted on 13 June 2008 10:53

DRAM manufacturers Elpida and Qimonda have scaled back the plans announced in their April Memorandum of Understanding with no joint plant, no management integration, and no making of each other's products. Instead they will jointly develop technology platforms and rules.

The two companies have signed special technology partnership contracts addressing joint DRAM chip development using Qimonda's Buried Wordline and Elpida's stack capacitor technologies. Specifically, the companies intend to introduce a jointly-developed 4F² cell concept in the 40nm process generation in 2010 and to subsequently scale it to a 30nm process. Elpida and Qimonda will align their development activities at their respective sites in Hiroshima and Dresden, which includes an exchange of engineers. They have also agreed to explore joint development opportunities in the areas of Through Silicon Via Technology and future memories as well as potential manufacturing joint ventures opportunities.

The future memory technologies refer to Phase-change RAM and Magneto-resistive RAM. 

Kin Wah Loh, President and CEO of Qimonda AG, said: “Building this technology partnership with Elpida now, is another major milestone on our strategic path. After having successfully transformed Qimonda to one of the broadest DRAM product suppliers and having introduced our new breakthrough Buried Wordline technology we are now realigning the partnership structure to support our non-PC diversified business model.”

The Elpida president and CEO, Yukio Sakamoto, was more succinct: "By concluding contract discussions with Qimonda in a short period of time the two companies have laid the foundation for stronger cooperation. Bringing together Elpida's and Qimonda's technologies to accelerate the development of advanced products will also help Elpida to more quickly reach its goal of becoming the world's No.1 DRAM supplier."

Currently Elpida is the fourth-ranked supplier with Qimonda as the number three.

Manufacturing joint ventures are still on the table for future discussion.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}