Investment & Expansion
Infineon Technologies Flash GmbH & Co. KG to develop Flash memory products.
The joint venture has plans to integrate DRAM and Flash expertise. Infineon
Flash stems from the Ingentix joint venture set up in 2001 by Infineon and
Saifun. Infineon now holds 70% of the joint venture with headquarters in
Dresden, Germany. As a result it is expected that 40 new jobs will be
created in the area.
Infineon Flash is managed jointly by Dr. Peter Kuecher (CEO), who previously
was responsible for Infineons 300mm development and production, and by Ramy
Langer (CMO) from Saifun.
"The first customers are currently being supplied with product samples of
64MByte Flash memories," reports Langer.
Saifuns NROMs store two bits inside one cell for increase memory capacity.
Volume production of the first data flash memories is scheduled to start in
H2 2003. The first program flash memories will follow in early 2004.
Infineon Flash produces both the flash memory and the necessary controller
chips.
Samsung Electronics has become a new shareholder in the Symbian operating
system (OS). The OS is designed for handheld devices and was originally
developed for the Psion electronic organiser.
Since then Symbian has been promoted for smartphones, with backing from
companies such as Nokia, Ericsson/Sony Ericsson and Motorola. Samsung will
acquire a 5.0% shareholding in Symbian for GBP17.0mn. Other shareholders are
Panasonic, Psion and Siemens.
Commentators saw the deal as a body blow to Microsofts hopes to gain a
foothold in the mobile phone market. Samsung had been the only big
manufacturer to license Microsofts mobile operating software. Samsung also
has a previous licence to Symbian.
The phone companies dont want to hand control of the market to others
fearing the sort of commoditisation that happened in the PC market where the
big money has gone to Microsoft and Intel reducing the manufacturers to
effectively making clones.
