Fountain Valley’s Kingston Technology Co., the world’s top maker of memory products for computers, is said to be making an investment in Tawainese chipmaker JMicron Technology Corp., according to reports.
JMicron is a maker of controller chips for solid state drives, which are made up of flash memory and have no moving parts.
In the second half of last year, Kingston started to use JMicron’s chips in its solid stated drives, according to a report in Asian tech news website digitimes.com.
Digitimes, citing unnamed sources, said “cooperation between the two has been growing since.”
JMicron is set to hold an investor meeting Tuesday to vote on a proposal to raise money, the report showed.
Financial details of the investment weren’t disclosed.
The company doesn’t comment on any of its investments, a spokesperson for Kingston said.
A few years ago, Kingston teamed up with Intel Corp. to make solid state drives for consumers.
Solid state drives are better at some tasks than traditional spinning disk drives.
Kingston markets them as “boot up” drives for consumers that allow older computers to run faster.
It’s not unusual for Kingston to take a stake in some of its suppliers.
Last year, the company invested some $200 million in Japan’s top chipmaker, Elpida Memory Inc.
Before that, it paid roughly $60 million for shares of Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Corp.
Kingston also holds a stake in Taiwanese memory chipmaker Phison Electronics Corp.
