Taipei - Micron Technology Inc on Thursday dropped its plan to join a new Taiwan chipmaker formed to challenge South Korea's domination of the memory-chip industry.   

    The US chipmaker made the announcement at a news conference in Taipei held jointly with its Taiwan partners Nanya Technology Co and Inotera Memories.

   Fred Fishburn, a Micron representative, said the decision was made because Micron's technologies are different from those of Elpida Memory Inc, the Japanese partner of the newly-formed Taiwan Memory Co (TMC), and it did not want to expose its secrets to Elpida.

   Nanya said that Micron's alliance with Nanya and Inotera has lasted for 10 years. The three partners will strengthen their alliance to advance their technology.

    Economics Minister Yin Chi-ming said Micron's decision not to join TMC is not entirely bad news for Taiwan, because Micron will boost cooperation with Nanya and Inotera.

   But he added that if Micron changes its mind in future, the Taiwan government would still willing to hold talks, "but the terms will be different."

   The Taiwan government formed TMC last month to integrate Taiwan's semiconductor industry, and to challenge South Korea's dominance of memory chip industry. TMC announced merger with Elpida on March 29.

   Dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips are main components of personal computers and serve as storage devices for applications running on them.