Major Japanese firms to cooperate on new chip plant

Hitachi, Toshiba and Renesas have announced that they are working together to build a new semiconductor plant. The three companies have also invited Matsushita Electrical and NEC Electronics. The proposed plant will produce 65 and 45 nm semiconductors. Very little details were released in the short, two-sentence announcement by the three companies.

"Hitachi, Toshiba and Renesas today announced that they have initiated a joint study on the feasibility of an independent semiconductor foundry business offering advanced fabrication processes to which each of the companies could outsource fabrication. The joint study will consider establishing of a planning company, the outline of which is not yet decided."

On December 8, TG Daily told you about Renesas who at the time was making a seemingly bad move by exiting the lucrative flash memory market. The company is ranked as the fourth largest producer of NAND flash memory and had a 464 percent increase in revenue. Now, everything seems to make more sense as Renesas now gets to partner up with two, possibly four other major Japanese companies.

Semiconductor factories are extremely expensive to build and Intel recently announced the building of a $3.5 billion dollar 45 nanometer chip plant in Israel.

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