Powerchip Semiconductor of Taiwan will be the next entrant to the booming NAND flash memory market.

"We have partners in the U.S. and Taiwan with which we're developing a product which will be sold under our own name later this year," a Powerchip spokesman told Electronics Weekly.
 
Powerchip would not comment on who its partner companies are or on whether the technology used would be the floating gate approach of Toshiba/SanDisk, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics/Hynix and Renesas Technology, or the metal nitride oxide semiconductor (MNOS) approach of Saifun, Infineon Technologies and AMD.

However, the spokesman emphasized: "Our product will have nothing to do with Renesas." Powerchip has a foundry agreement with Renesas under which it will start producing 1Gbit NAND flash in Q3 using the assist-gate AND technology developed by Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric which merged most of their semiconductor operations into Renesas. Mitsubishi Electric set up Powerchip in 1998 as a joint venture with Taiwan's Umax-Elite.

NAND flash was the fastest growing chip product in 2003 increasing revenues by more than 40 percent. Gartner Dataquest forecasts 2004 growth of 30 percent from $3.36 billion to $4.4 billion. In 2006, predicts iSuppli, the NAND market will top $11.5 billion.