Nanya denies report of tie-up with Micron

Nanya Technology Thursday denied a report that says it plans to enter a technology agreement and possible joint-venture with Micron of the U.S. and dump its current partner, Germany's Qimonda.

A Reuters report said the Taiwan company had already signed a memorandum of understanding with Micron for technology licensing for DRAM (dynamic RAM) and a planned chip factory. Should the relationship between the companies progress, they would enter a joint venture and Nanya might dump its current technology partner, the report says.

Nanya Technology's spokesman denied the report.

"The [DRAM] industry is in such a difficult situation right now, so there are a lot of rumors. This is just one of those rumors and it is not true," said Pai Pei-lin, a vice president and spokesman of Nanya Technology.

The Reuters report did not disclose the names of any sources used in the story, but did say the report was confirmed by people at both Nanya Technology and Micron.

A deal between the two companies would be a blow to Qimonda. The company, spun-off by Infineon two years ago, uses a different technology than Micron and the rest of the DRAM industry for chip production, and losing partners such as Nanya Technology would further increase its manufacturing research and development costs.

Qimonda's chip production technology is known as "trench" and it's far less popular than the "stack" technology used by Samsung Electronics and most of Qimonda's other major rivals. Pundits have said that as chip production process technologies continue to shrink the size of features on a chip, "trench" technology simply doesn't work as well as "stack."

Pai said the claim is not true, and that "trench" technology actually works better than "stack."