Elpida Brand Guidelines: NEC, Hitachi & a Greek Word for Hope

Two rivals pool their DRAM.

Elpida was born of a merger. On 20 December 1999, Japanese Wikipedia says, NEC and Hitachi combined their DRAM businesses in a new company, NEC Hitachi Memory, with its head office in Tokyo. English Wikipedia adds that both parents later moved their other semiconductor operations into a separate company, Renesas. The joint company started development of DRAM products in 2000 and, on 28 September 2000, took the name Elpida Memory.

The new name came from Greek: elpida is the Greek word for “hope,” as English Wikipedia notes. Japanese Wikipedia describes the early years as weak, with executives sent in turn from the two parent companies and the firm’s share of the DRAM market falling in 2002.

Elpida grew by gathering what was left of Japan’s DRAM industry. In March 2003 it took over the DRAM business of Mitsubishi Electric, together with Mitsubishi’s development engineers. In September 2003 it set up a production subsidiary, Hiroshima Elpida Memory, which in September 2004 acquired the assets of Hiroshima NEC and was absorbed into the parent in April 2008, Japanese Wikipedia says. The company began building a 300 mm wafer plant in 2001, according to English Wikipedia.

On 15 November 2004 Elpida listed its shares on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In 2006 it set up Akita Elpida to take on back-end work such as advanced packaging, and in January 2007 it formally agreed a joint venture with the Taiwanese chipmaker Powerchip, called Rexchip, which became a consolidated subsidiary in November 2008. In February 2011 it added a listing of depositary receipts in Taiwan.

DRAM for computers, phones and graphics.

Elpida made one kind of product: DRAM, the working memory of computers, phones and games machines. English Wikipedia describes it as a company that developed, designed, made and sold DRAM, and also worked as a semiconductor foundry. Its chips went into PCs and servers as standard DDR memory, into phones as low-power mobile DRAM, and into graphics cards as graphics memory.

Its announcements show the pace of that work. In April 2010, English Wikipedia says, Elpida announced what it described as the world’s first four-gigabit DDR3 chip, built on a 40 nm process; in August 2011 it said it was the first memory maker to begin sampling 25 nm DRAM. We give both as the company’s own claims, as reported at the time. Japanese Wikipedia records that volume production of GDDR5 graphics memory began in Taiwan in the first half of 2010 and in Hiroshima later that year.

Some of that graphics work came from Germany. In August 2009, after the Munich memory maker Qimonda had gone into insolvency, Elpida took over its GDDR3 and GDDR5 technology and development team and opened a design centre in Munich, Japanese Wikipedia says; the two companies had agreed a technology and production partnership in 2008. In 2010 Elpida also took over flash-memory technology and a research site in Italy from Spansion, aiming at combined flash and DRAM memory.

Elpida also shared in an industry-wide legal case. From 2002 the US Department of Justice investigated price-fixing among DRAM makers, and English Wikipedia lists Elpida among the five manufacturers that pleaded guilty, alongside Hynix, Infineon, Micron and Samsung; Japanese Wikipedia dates Elpida’s settlement with the department to January 2006. A separate civil case brought by US computer makers was settled by Elpida in February 2009, Japanese Wikipedia says.

English Wikipedia shows Elpida’s former logo as the company name set in blue capital letters.

Memory makers and how they present themselves.

Memory chips are hard to show. A finished DRAM or flash die is a sliver of silicon sealed inside a black package, and the companies that make them sell mostly to other manufacturers rather than to the public. So memory makers tend to build their visual identity from the stages around the chip: the wafer, the module, the drive and the place where it all ends up.

The wafer is the most common image. A polished disc covered in a tight grid of identical dies, often lit so that the surface breaks into bands of colour, says “scale” and “precision” without needing a product name. Close-ups follow the chip outward: DRAM modules with rows of packages along a green board, SSD circuit boards with a controller and flash packages side by side, and cross-section diagrams that show memory cells stacked in layers, the shorthand for 3D NAND.

The factory is the second theme. Cleanroom corridors, staff in full-body suits and long rows of wafer-handling equipment appear in annual reports, recruitment pages and listing documents, usually photographed in cool, even light. At the other end of the chain come data-centre racks, banks of servers and drives that show where the memory is put to work.

Trade shows give the category its public stage. Memory and storage makers present new parts at events such as FMS, the Flash Memory Summit, and Computex in Taipei, where stands mix wafer displays, product cases and technical posters. Across these settings the typical register is a clean sans, a cool or dark palette with one bright accent, and diagrams in place of lifestyle photography; the guides in this series look at how each maker works within, or departs from, that pattern.

From reorganisation to Micron Memory Japan.

The end came quickly. Japanese Wikipedia links Elpida’s losses to a very strong yen and steep falls in DRAM prices after the 2008 financial crisis. In June 2009 Japan’s economy ministry approved support for the company under the revised Industrial Revitalization Act, making it the first ordinary company to receive public capital under that law, Japanese Wikipedia says. In February 2012 its auditors flagged doubt about its future.

On 27 February 2012 Elpida filed for corporate reorganisation at the Tokyo District Court, with a parallel US filing in Delaware. The German news site heise online, carrying a dpa report that day, said the DRAM maker had sought creditor protection after falling chip prices; its subsidiary Akita Elpida filed on the same day. Elpida’s shares were delisted on 28 March 2012.

Micron Technology became the sponsor. A sponsor agreement was reached in July 2012, the Tokyo court approved the reorganisation plan on 28 February 2013, and on 31 July 2013 Micron completed the purchase of all Elpida shares, making it a wholly owned subsidiary, Japanese news site Mynavi News reported in January 2014. Micron also took over Rexchip by adding Powerchip’s stake to Elpida’s holding, Japanese Wikipedia says.

The name went next. On 23 January 2014 Elpida announced that from 28 February 2014 it would be called Micron Memory Japan, and that Akita Elpida would become Micron Akita, Mynavi News reported. Product branding was unified under Micron, Japanese Wikipedia says. The reorganisation proceedings were formally closed by the Tokyo court in July 2020, and in 2021 the company was reported to have moved its head office from Tokyo to the Hiroshima plant in Higashihiroshima. Micron Akita was later sold, with Powertech Technology agreeing in August 2017 to take majority stakes in it and in Tera Probe, English Wikipedia says.

So Elpida no longer trades: the company continues as Micron Memory Japan, and the Hiroshima fab it built up now makes Micron memory. In 2022, Japanese Wikipedia says, Micron began volume production of its 1-beta DRAM there.

For a design guide, Elpida shows how a merged company can take a fresh, hopeful name and how that name can vanish into a buyer’s brand within months. Compare Micron, the company that absorbed it, and Qimonda, another memory maker of the same years. For this guide we use a deep blue, a navy and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Elpida’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.