Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, March 8, 1990                   TAG: 9003081980
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: C-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: TOKYO                                 LENGTH: Medium

NEC, AT&T PLAN TO WORK AS TEAM

The agreement should enhance the U.S. company's access to Japan's world-dominating electronics market.

NEC, the world's largest maker of semiconductors, agreed to cooperate with AT&T's Microelectronics Division on various projects for at least five years.

Under the agreement, AT&T Microelectronics will receive a license to market, design and produce NEC's advanced gate-array computer chips, which are used widely in computers and other electronic devices.

AT&T does not have the technology to produce these chips on its own, spokeswoman Barbara Baklarz said from AT&T Microelectronics headquarters in Berkeley Heights, N.J.

In return, NEC will receive AT&T's most sophisticated computer-aided tools used to design computer chips, William Warwick, president of AT&T Microelectronics, told reporters in Tokyo.

He said the two companies also are working on accelerating the placement of AT&T semiconductor products into a variety of NEC products, such as communications systems and computers.

In addition, AT&T Microelectronics will help manufacture certain NEC chips widely used in consumer electronics products.

AT&T Microelectronics announced two weeks ago that it will produce semiconductor memory chips for the international market in a joint venture with Mitsubishi Electric Corp., another major Japanese chip manufacturer.

International Business Machines Corp. said in January that it would set up a joint venture with Siemens AG of West Germany to develop advanced memory chips.

Gate-array chips are the logic chips that customize computers according to their use. They are a key component of a computer, along with its microprocessor, or "brain," and its memory.