Actel and Infineon Technologies are to jointly develop Flash memory field-programmable gate array (FPGA) solutions for production in a 0.13micron process. The work will build on Actel's Flash-based ProASIC FPGA family and Infineon's process technology. New market segments will be investigated such as smartcards, automotive, industrial controls and mobile communications. The deal expands on a 1997 Flash process development and manufacturing agreement between the companies.

Agere Systems and Samsung Semiconductor have agreed collaboration on
high-speed Network-DRAM, Samsung's high-speed memory is designed for
broadband networking applications such as 10Gbit Ethernet and OC-192
synchronous optical networks (SONET). The technology will be used with
Agere's PayloadPlus family of programmable network processors for deep
packet processing in high-speed networks. Target customers include original
equipment manufacturers (OEM) of high-capacity network and telecoms systems.
The plan is for the next generation of Network-DRAM to support industrial
temperature ranges with 400MHz double data rate (800 Mbits/sec) effective
performance. Network-DRAM is fully compatible with fast cycle random access
memory (FCRAM), the high-speed networking memory technology jointly
developed by Fujitsu and Toshiba. Samsung is currently mass-producing
256Mbit Network-DRAM devices. Agere recently announced similar agreements
with Fujitsu and Toshiba.