Micron Technology and Nanya Technology Corp., two leading producers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and flash, on Monday announced today that the two companies had signed an agreement to create MeiYa Technology Corp., a new DRAM joint venture.

The partnership will leverage both Micron and Nanya’s manufacturing technology, strengths and experience. As part of the joint venture, a 200mm Nanya manufacturing facility in Taiwan will be upgraded to 300mm technology starting this year, with the facility coming online for production in 2009. In addition to MeiYa, the parties will jointly develop and share future process technology technology.

“This partnership brings greater scale and efficiency to the DRAM manufacturing operations of both parent companies, and Micron is pleased to officially enter into this joint venture with Nanya,” said Mark Durcan, Micron’s president and chief operating officer.

Both parent companies will own 50% of the joint venture initially, and each will contribute $550 million in cash by the end of 2009. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval in Taiwan, and is expected to close within the next few months.

Nanya already has a joint-venture with Qimonda AG, former memory business unit of Infineon, called Inotera Memories. Meanwhile Micro Technology is not involved into any DRAM joint-ventures, but co-owns IM-Flash joint-venture with Intel Corp. Back in the days Micron wanted to acquire Hynix Semiconductor and even was rumoured to be aiming Qimonda before its spin-off from Infineon, however, with no luck.

Joint-ventures between DRAM companies are not new. It is a costly process to develop fabrication technologies and build a fab to produce memory chips, but it is also uneasy to fully utilize manufacturing capacities. Joint ventures allow memory makers to share the costs and then utilize capacities more efficiently. Another way for large memory vendors like Micron to acquire additional production capacities is to trade process technology for capacity, though, such relationships are not as stable as joint-ventures.

“We are sure that MeiYa will demonstrate the synergistic combinations of Nanya and Micron’s strength in the DRAM industry. Nanya has a very high expectation for this new entity,” said Dr. Jih Lien, Nanya’s president.

Intel Corp. has been developing various computing platforms for the healthcare industry for several years now, but without the properly made software hardware can hardly bring any benefits and in order to address that issue the chipmaker has developed Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare, software that provides an efficient way to exchange healthcare information inside hospitals and with health information networks

Until now, the sharing of patient information among healthcare network participants has been hindered by the steep costs and complexities of proprietary data and integration services. Based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare offers a cost-efficient solution to this problem by providing scaleable way to translate, process and connect any data format across a healthcare network.

In addition, world’s largest producer of x86 microprocessors has created a group of validated independent software vendors (ISVs) that provides capabilities to deploy a complete health network powered by the Intel SOA Expressway. Current validated ecosystem vendors include Apelon, Infotech Global (IGI), Initiate Systems, Oracle and Red Hat. Services provided by these vendors include controlled medical vocabulary translation, clinical patient portal applications, enterprise master patient index, clinical data repository and operating system support. The validated ecosystem helps complete next-generation SOA architecture for healthcare data interoperability.

Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare provides the performance of a hardware appliance in a software form factor that offers native message acceleration for rapid data exchange, workflow management and translation to enable data exchange to and from any original format. This advance in software is an example of how technology can help improve patient care and reduce healthcare costs by streamlining information flow.

In order to make Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare as versatile as possible, Intel designed it as a flexible product offering that can stand alone as the gateway to and from a community health information network or can be bundled as part of an ISV solution.

The software solution has been successfully piloted with several healthcare providers, including at a hospital network in Shanghai, according to Intel.

“Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare solved a very difficult hospital integration scenario for us. We were surprised to see that it was able to meet our performance requirements for daily synchronization of nearly a million hospital records in a short amount of time,” said Shen Ping, general manager of health services division at Wonders Information Co, the systems integrator deploying the Shanghai health network.

“Intel has developed the SOA Expressway for Healthcare as a platform that can be used with a wide variety of existing IT environments to provide world-class integration regardless of the specific electronic medical records and other software platforms used at individual healthcare facilities. We also leveraged the SOA architecture to drive down costs, which has enabled Intel to offer our solution at prices comparable or below other solutions in the market,” said Renee James, vice president and general manager of Intel’s software and solutions group.

Asustek Computer officially announced that after the Computex Taipei 2008 trade-show the company would commercially release its second-generation Asus Eee PC system powered by Intel Atom processor. The company said that the new system would have longer battery life thanks to lower power consumption of the Atom, but did not provide any additional details.

Helen Ling, a spokeswoman for Asustek Computer’s UK subsidiary said in an interview that Asus Eee PC based on Intel Atom processor would arrive to the UK by the end of June, after Computex trade-show, TechRadar web-site reports. The information was confirmed by Jerry Shen, Asustek’s chief executive at a press conference in Taipei, Taiwan, who reiterated plans to unveil its Atom-based small form-factor laptop at Computex Taipei, the largest trade-show in Asia that kicks off on the 3^rd of June and ends on the 7^th if June, 2008, reports IDG News Services.

It is surprising that Asustek Computer decided to release its second-generation Eee PC based on Intel Atom processor just two months after it started to ship its Asus Eee PC 900, a version of Asus Eee PC based on the same Intel Celeron M processor as the original model, but featuring 8.9” screen with higher resolution.

In addition to Asus Eee PC many other companies are entering the market of very affordable mobile computers, which is why Asus does need to constantly improve its Eee PC to stay competitive. Increased battery life, boosted performance and, perhaps, richer feature-set may provide Asus a number of strong benefits on the market. For example, adding a 3G or WiMAX connectivity will allow Asus to sell its Eee PC through telecommunication operators who are interested in selling their customers affordable hardware to offered services.

Asus did not provide any additional details about Intel Atom-based Eee PC in particular as well as about further development of the Eee products in general. However, it is possible to expect Asustek to reveal more information at Open Tech Summit Taiwan 2008 later this month.