Digitimes reports that Formosa Plastics Group, the parent company of DRAM makers Nanya Technology and Inotera Memories, is prepared to pursue talks with John Hsuan, chairman elect of Taiwan Memory Company (TMC), for its possible involvement in the just-announced DRAM entity. The island's largest plastics manufacturing conglomerate has been backing its subsidiaries' camp, with Micron Technology of the US as the technology partner, in the race to receive capital support from the Taiwan government. Other TMC parties, Rexchip, Powerchip, ProMOS Technologies and Winbond, support Elpida of Japan as the technology partner.
The rumor is that Aptina has selected Nanya as its Far-East manufacturing partner, in addition to Micron's Italy fab, but this was well before the TMC idea. John Hsuan, the chairman of the new entity, is rumored to be a big supporter of image sensor manufacturing at TMC. So, if Nanya joins TMC (it has some good reasons to remain separate, though), we might find all six TMC member companies producing Aptina-developed sensors.
This is interesting: we see an amalgam of profit-less DRAM makers combining forces in hopes of somehow or other turning a profit by consolidating and perhaps reducing the number of suppliers in the market.
ReplyDeleteNow out of the other side of the fab, we see them entertaining the idea of building another money-losing product in high volume: image sensors for "barbiecams".
At least the barbiecam sensors don't need a state of the art fab in order to make an interesting product.
I expect TM to have a lot of problems getting off the ground and keeping together once they do: too many bitter enemies placed into the same box and at least one of them has a demonstrated history of being an unscrupulous price fixer that turned state's evidence just as soon as the feds began to investigate: turning in and sending to jail executives from their conspiratorial comrades to keep their tails out of the graybar hotel.
( read the jury forewoman's quote in the article linked below; http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1204804010871 and now the person of the derision is a VP at Inotera....)
I don't see how this amalgam can possibly be successful and I would not want to be reliant upon them for my precious wafer starts...