Toshiba to up flash-chip production 150 percent

Toshiba, the world's seventh-largest chip maker, competes with industry leader Samsung Electronics in the fast-growing market for NAND flash memory, widely used in digital cameras, photo-snapping phones and portable music players such as Apple Computer's iPod Shuffle.

Toshiba is likely to boost processing capacity at its NAND flash plant handling 300-mm silicon wafers to 100,000 wafers a month by as early as March 2008 from a planned 10,000 wafers in September 2005, the newspaper said.

Combined with Toshiba's NAND output capacity at its 200-mm wafer plant, total NAND flash production capability will rise to the equivalent of 150,000 300-mm wafers per month, up from 60,000 wafers next month, it said.

Toshiba jointly owns the 300-mm NAND plant in central Japan's Mie prefecture with SanDisk. The paper did not specify whether the capacity expansion would be carried out by Toshiba alone or with the U.S. partner.

Toshiba officials were not immediately available for comment.

Announcing its medium-term business strategy earlier this month, Toshiba said it planned to allocate resources heavily to growth areas including semiconductor operations.

The electronics conglomerate, which offers products ranging from nuclear power systems to notebook PCs, plans 1.1 trillion yen of capital expenditure in the three years to March 2008, with half of it earmarked for its microchip business.

Toshiba also said in its latest business plan that improved efficiency had made it possible to raise the maximum monthly capacity at the 300-mm plant to the equivalent of 100,000 wafers from the originally estimated 62,500 wafers.

But the company did not comment on the timetable or the amount of capital spending for additional investment.

Toshiba's microchip division is its biggest profit earner. Chip operations account for more than half of its operating profit, even though they represent only 16 percent of sales.