BV> Thought you might be interested in this one...

 BV> Samsung Electronics is establishing it's *first* US
 BV> semiconductor manufacturing facility in Travis County, Austin,
 BV> Texax. The US$1.3 billion fab plant is considered the largest
 BV> single Korean investment in the US. Construction is expected to
 BV> be completed by the second quarter of 1997, and production
 BV> should begin during the fourth quarter of 1997. Samsung will
 BV> use the facility to produce -!- Wait for it --- 16- and 64-Mb
 BV> DRAMs. The plant will use 0.35- to 0.3-um technology with
 BV> 8-inch wafers in a Class 1 cleanroom.

  Jeeze! Korea is dead serious about leap-frogging Japan, then! They
must hope to use US technology as a flow-on back to Korea. How on
earth does Paul think any company could raise $1,300M without 
governemnt support!

 BV> FWIW, the same journal ( Asian Electronics Engineer ) has an
 BV> advert from Hyundi who are claiming to have the first single
 BV> chip MPEG-2 decoder available. You no doubt remember that it
 BV> was decidedly impossible to quantify the actual resolution of a
 BV> video image ? Well, guess what active resolution this thing
 BV> puts out ... 720x576 Sounds a little familiar, wot :)

  These Asian journals arealways madly optimistic. A few years ago
someone claimned an LCD display that we hunted down avidly... only to
find it was all hype. But it probably means they've got it in the
labs.

  My little mate hasn't had anything to do with the Koreans for a long
time now, but what drove them was a hatred of all things Japanese. At
the time they were using Jap technology, and every time they managed
to dodge around it they let us know.

Regards,
Bob
___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
@EOT:

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