MUNICH -- Infineon Technologies AG today announced two separate memory foundry agreements with Taiwan's Winbond Electronics Corp. and Mosel Vitelic Inc., both in Hsinchu, to increase its DRAM production capacity at a time when the German chip maker believes the market is beginning to recover from a long and steep downturn.
Infineon said it will license its advanced DRAM trench process technology to Winbond and, beginning in 2003, gain exclusive access to standard DRAMs fabricated with this technology.
The Munich-based company also said it has reached an agreement with Mosel Vitelic to increase its share in the output of DRAMs from their joint-venture, ProMOS Technologies Inc. Infineon's share has been raised from 38% to 48%, effective March 1.
Together, these two new agreements will increase Infineon's total production capacity for DRAMs by more than 20,000 eight-inch wafer starts per month, according to officials in Munich.
"Executing on our strategy to further strengthen our ties with Taiwanese partners, Infineon considers these cooperations as a major step to prepare for the upcoming market recovery," said Ulrich Schumacher, president and CEO of Infineon. "Shifting production capacity to Infineon along with building on our leading technology and cost position will pave the way for further augmenting our worldwide market position in the consolidating DRAM industry."
The moves come after four months of steady increases in average selling prices for DRAMs, which have caused some market research firms to hike their forecasts for worldwide memory sales in 2002. Analysts at iSuppli Corp., for example, increases their DRAM forecast a growth of 55% or more in 2002, saying that revenues would exceed $17.3 million this year. Previously, iSuppli had been forecasting a flat year with 2001 sales (see March 5 story).
The ProMOS joint venture was formed in Hsinchu during 1996 between Mosel Vitelic and Siemens Semiconductors (which later was spun off as Infineon). Since then, Infineon has entered into several technology transfer agreements with publicly-traded ProMOS, including 300-mm wafer technology and various generations of manufacturing process technology.
ProMOS is now preparing to start 300-mm production, and it licensed 0.14-micron technology from Infineon last fall. Infineon said the joint-venture company's main products now include 128- and 256-Mbit DRAMs in synchronous (SDRAM) and double-data rate (DDR) configurations, primarily for use in servers and other computer applications.
