One More Player on a Crowded Field

Powertech Technology Inc is a company that focused mostly on integrated circuits for memory packaging and while its business shows signs of steady growth, the company announced that it will start investments in order to expand to logic IC packaging. Mass production is expected to start the following year, according to an investors conference held on the 26th of July cited by the news site Digitimes.

The consequences of the volatile and shaky computer memory market left some lingering effects on the Powertech Technology company and the CEO DK Tsai said that his company will expand its products base to cover the logic integrated circuits packaging in order to reduce the risk and provide the company with additional revenues. The technology employed for logic packaging will be the "quad-flat-pack-no-lead" one and the initial investment will range from $600 million to $1 billion. The advantage of employing the above mentioned packaging technology is that is can be used for memory packaging as well.

During the early stage, in the first months of 2008, the PTI company chairman said that they will produce and ship 10 million units per month and that they will start with some logic circuits that have a lower pin count, like the handset ICs. A related testing and quality assurance service will also come online sometime during the second half of the next year. Regarding NAND flash chips production the PTI chairman is optimist that demand will start to increase in the following months, which will also increase the still low sales. Tsai said and was cited by Digitimes that because of being a high risk market, his company will keep their NAND flash chips at about 30 percent of the total production capacity.

According to Digitimes, "Kingston Technology, in the meantime, backed PTI's positive sales projection, citing an improved memory market outlook. Company founder David Sun noted that DRAM prices are stabilizing, while demand for NAND flash is steadily growing, as the memory is adopted by more applications. He added that tight NAND flash supply will persist through 2008".