Elpida said it has completed construction of its 300 mm wafer fabrication facility "E300" in Hiroshima, Japan. The new facility will focus on manufacturing DRAM chips and is expected to output 54,000 wafers per month by the end of the first quarter of 2006. The company claims that this will make E300 the largest semiconductor wafer processing capacity in Japan.

"Our first lot of wafers for mass production of DRAM using advanced 90 nm process technology started on October 17, 2005," said Shuichi Otsuka, president of Hiroshima Elpida. "Our initial ramp has been extremely smooth and successful, and each day we are seeing an increase in the number of wafers processed." According to Otsuka, the fab produced 45,000 wafers in November ans is expected to hit 50,000 in December.