MEMORY CHIPS HIT NEW HIGH IBM BEATS JAPAN IN MARKETING RACE

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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 19, 1992                   TAG: 9202190051
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium
MEMORY CHIPS HIT NEW HIGH IBM BEATS JAPAN IN MARKETING RACE
IBM said Tuesday it is the first computer maker to build a new generation of memory chips and offer them in a product, beating Japanese rivals in the important technology.
The fingernail-sized chips can store 16 million bits of data, the equivalent of about 1,600 pages of double-spaced, typewritten text. That's four times the capacity of today's most advanced memory chips.
International Business Machines Corp. designed the chips at a plant in Essex Junction, Vt., and will make them there and in France.
An industry analyst called the achievement impressive, but said the world's largest computer maker probably only has a lead of a few months.
"The good news is they're ahead at all of the Japanese," said Michael Murphy, a technology analyst who publishes the California Technology Stock Letter.
Because of the way chips are designed, each generation expands in capacity by a factor of four. Researchers at IBM and elsewhere already are at work designing a 64-megabit chip.
Murphy said some Japanese chip makers have been shipping limited quantities of 16-megabit memory chips to customers for testing. He predicted Japanese companies will start shipping computers containing these chips by June.
The top three Japanese memory chip makers are Toshiba, NEC Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. Also in the race is American chip maker Texas Instruments Corp., which produces memory chips at a Japanese plant, and Korean electronics maker Samsung.
IBM said it will offer the new chips in the new high-end model of its AS-400 minicomputer line announced Tuesday. IBM will start shipping the $900,000 machines to customers on March 6.
IBM said the computers are up to 70 percent more powerful than the previous generation AS-400s. The machines start at $10,200 and are aimed at small- to medium-sized businesses.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB