Toshiba Corp. of Japan and Infineon Technologies AG of Germany on Thursday announced an agreement to jointly develop nonvolatile ferroelectric random access memory (FeRAM) technology and products.

Nonvolatile FeRAM has the high speed and endurance of widely used dynamic and static random access memories. It can also preserve data in devices when power is switched off.

Toshiba and Infineon plan to introduce a 32-megabit FeRAM for use in cellular phones as their first jointly developed product.

Engineering samples of the new product will be released in March, paving the way for commercialization at the end of 2002, the two companies said.

The 32-megabit FeRAM device is expected to replace the current multichip package module for cellular phones. This consists of a static RAM chip and nonvolatile flash memory in a stacked configuration.

Toshiba and Infineon will further expand their collaboration to 64-megabit and possibly 128-megabit devices, depending on market conditions.

TDK unit buys Sierra

Leading electronic parts manufacturer TDK Corp. on Thursday said its U.S. subsidiary has purchased U.S. semiconductor developer Sierra Research and Technology Inc.

California-based TDK Semiconductor Corp. bought all shares in SRT for $26 million, or about 2.8 billion yen, TDK said in a news release.

The purchase is expected to help strengthen TDK Semiconductor's development of integrated circuits that can be used for local area network and wide area network systems of gigabit capacity, the news release said.

SRT, set up in California in 1993, is capitalized at $3.37 million. It has staff of about 20.