FRANKFURT (Thomson Financial) - Qimonda AG and Sony Corp agreed to form a joint venture to design high-performance, low power memory chips for consumer and graphic applications.
The 50-50 joint venture, to be called Qreatic Design and based in Tokyo, will start with up to 30 specialists for DRAMs from Sony and Qimonda at the end of this year, subject to regulatory approval.
The company then plans to hire additional designers.
German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG holds 78.6 pct of shares in Qimonda and is in the process of reducing its stake in the company to 'significantly' less than 50 pct by 2009.
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