Fujitsu 256Kbit DRAM from 1985
Fujitsu, formed in 1935, became a pre-eminent Japanese electronics technology business. Telecom equipment, systems and consumer devices; personal computers to mainframes; like other global corporations at the time they invested heavily in vertical integration technologies. They were the first company in the world to develop 64Kbit DRAM memories in 1978, and invested heavily to develop and manufacture higher density memories. The DRAM chip shown here is an NMOS 256Kbit DRAM from 1985. This was the year that Intel and other American companies pulled out of the DRAM market due to price pressure from Japanese companies. Fujitsu introduced their 1Mbit DRAM later that same year. The DRAM was first developed in IBM, then adopted by other US companies. By 1985 only a couple of US suppliers remained. IBM however, continued to manufacture for their own internal demand.