Coming late to memory-chip fabrication, they had more recent technology than Japan and South Korea.
Plunging memory-chip prices mean that Samsung can no longer rely on its cash cow, however.
Two years ago, Micron bought (with equity) the memory-chip operations of Texas Instruments, an American rival.
ECONOMIST: Semiconductors: America, memory-chip Lazarus | The
Defendants were software companies (including Symantec), programmable semiconductor firms (including Altera) and memory-chip makers (including Hynix Semiconductor).
But Kobe, deep in debt, needs new capital to survive, and is now leaving the memory-chip business.
ECONOMIST: Semiconductors: America, memory-chip Lazarus | The
Bigger, financially sound companies do have access to cheaper capital, which is indeed a competitive advantage in memory-chip making.
Oki will keep its memory-chip operation in business to supply system LSIs -- chips packing several functions on one silicon wafer.
The memory-chip maker has shrunk its debt and expects to make a decent profit this year, thanks to rising chip prices.
He joked that the memory-chip business was more hazardous than flying.
South Korean memory-chip makers have been hit with heavy duties.
It is a worrying sign for Samsung which isn't only the world's biggest mobile-phone maker but is also the largest television-set manufacturer and memory-chip producer because of its growing reliance on mobile-phone earnings.
In South Korea, Samsung and Hyundai, the country's two largest industrial conglomerates, turned their semiconductor units into two of the world's three biggest memory-chip makers (the third is America's Micron Technology).
Despite the present memory-chip downturn, Micron's finances are healthy.
ECONOMIST: Semiconductors: America, memory-chip Lazarus | The
Whereas creating a memory-chip industry is mostly a matter of buying fabrication equipment off the shelf, classier chips require lots of well-trained engineers, research and technology partners elsewhere in the computer industry.
The Hewlett-Packard scientist behind the project, Phil Kuekes, said his next step would be to build a 16-bit memory chip in a tiny square--no more than 100 billionths of a meter inside.
Flush with cash from its then- booming memory chip business, Samsung enlisted Nissan in 1994 to build a world-class auto business from scratch.
Tests now under way at Motorola and elsewhere suggest that a one-size-fits-all memory chip is emerging: MRAM (magnetic random access memory).
The Duron also includes a larger on-chip memory cache than the K6-2, and AMD's Enhanced 3DNow instructions, designed to boost multimedia performance.
Tests now under way at Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people ) and elsewhere suggest that a one-size-fits-all memory chip is emerging: MRAM, for magnetic random access memory.
Such success prompted the company, now the third-largest memory chip maker in South Korea and among the world's top 10, to plan its IPO in hopes of becoming a stock market darling too.
Then, in 1969, when Intel was developing a 64-bit memory chip for Honeywell, Moore realized the key to getting the chip to function properly was to "dope" the chips with small amounts of impurities.
It'd pack 2, 688 shader units, a 384-bit memory bus and 6GB of RAM, all with one chip -- for reference, the GTX 690 needs two GPUs to offer 3, 072 shader units and has 4GB of RAM.
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Kuekes said his molecular memory chip should be lab-ready by 2001.
When memory chip maker LG Semi-con of South Korea decided to go public this year, it could not have foreseen that the bottom would drop out of the market for its primary product.
The tablet phenomenon in the world today is bigger than the size of its memory chip, more awe-inspiring than the speed of its processor it is a wonder of our time, and in an ever more connected and computerized world, it may be the perfect tool for the industrious, creative, modern human.
XE300M22-A01US carries a 2.5GHz, Sandy Bridge-era dual-core chip on top of the usual 4GB of memory and 16GB solid-state drive.
As we said, the main differences you'll see between these US-centric models and the original version are the processor and amount of RAM used: the American variants all make use of a dual-core, 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 chip and 2GB of memory, while the I9300 runs on quad-core Exynos silicon and one gig of RAM.
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The highly advanced chip will enable high-density memory solutions such as embedded NAND storage and solid state drives (SSDs).
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