Nanya: No Plan to Invest in Infineon DRAM

Nanya Technology has no plans to take a stake in the memory chip company Infineon Technologies will spin off this year, an executive said Thursday.

Nanya, which is based in Taiwan and shares a joint venture chip operation with Infineon, also has no plans to merge with or be bought out by the German company, said Pai Pei-lin, vice president of global marketing and sales at Nanya Technology, in an interview.

Infineon announced its intention to leave the boom-bust DRAM industry last year, in a plan aimed at creating a new company and taking it public through an initial public offering, most likely on an Asian stock market. The German chip giant plans to focus instead on logic chips used in autos, industrial electronics, communications and other products.

The chip maker plans to formally spin off its memory chip business by July 1, 2006, but the headquarters of the new company will remain in Germany and will be led by Kin Wah Loh, head of the company’s memory products group.

The industry has been rife with speculation that Nanya Technology or another company tied to the Formosa Plastics Group, a major Taiwanese conglomerate, would take a stake in the Infineon spin-off in order to ensure their continued partnership in technology development and the joint venture. Pai said no such plans are in the works.

Infineon’s memory products spin-off would rank among the top five DRAM makers in the world, according to market researcher Gartner. Analysts say that one major issue facing the company is its chip production technology, known as “trench,” which is far less popular than the “stack” technology used by Samsung Electronics and most of Infineon’s other major rivals.

Pundits have said that as chip production process technologies continue to shrink the size of features on a chip, “trench” technology simply doesn’t work as well as “stack.” Pai refuted the claim, saying “trench” production technology actually works better as chip features shrink.

-Dan Nystedt, IDG News Service

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