Nanya Technology Brand Guidelines: Formosa Plastics’ DRAM Maker in New Taipei

An Oki licence, a first fab and a new company.

Nanya Technology is a DRAM maker that grew out of a plastics company. The company’s own timeline says that in May 1994 Nan Ya Plastics, a member of Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics Group, signed a 16Mb DRAM technology-transfer agreement with Japan’s Oki. Construction of a first fab began in January 1995, and Nanya Technology Corporation was incorporated on 4 March 1995. In April that year Oki, Nan Ya Plastics and the new company signed a memorandum passing the rights and obligations of the technology deal to Nanya Technology.

Chinese-language Wikipedia, citing the China Times, says the idea of entering DRAM came from Wang Wen-yang, son of the group’s founder Wang Yung-ching, and was taken up by the founder, with Nan Ya Plastics leading the new company. The link to the group is still visible: Nanya’s website closes with a line crediting the Formosa Plastics Group.

The first products came quickly. Nanya says its 16Mb DRAM pilot run succeeded in July 1996 and sales began in October, and that a licence from Oki for 64Mb DRAM on 0.36- and 0.32-micron processes followed in November 1996. Chinese-language Wikipedia records a US branch in San Jose in 1997, a memory design centre in Houston, Texas, in 1998, and a further technology agreement that November with IBM, covering DRAM on 0.2- to 0.175-micron processes. Nanya listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in August 2000, and in 2001 launched Elixir, its own brand of memory modules for retail buyers, the same source says.

Infineon, Qimonda and Micron.

For most of its history Nanya built chips on processes developed with partners. In November 2002 it signed a joint venture with Germany’s Infineon to build 300-millimetre DRAM capacity in Taoyuan; the joint company, Inotera Memories, began loading wafers in April 2004, Chinese-language Wikipedia says. When Infineon spun off its memory business as Qimonda in 2006, Qimonda took over Infineon’s half of Inotera. In October 2008 Qimonda sold its Inotera stake to Micron, and Nanya moved from the deep-trench capacitor technology it had used with Infineon to Micron’s stacked-capacitor design. Qimonda filed for insolvency in January 2009.

The 2008 downturn hit Nanya hard. In 2009 it cut its share capital by about two-thirds and raised new money through a private placement taken up by Formosa Plastics Group companies, Chinese-language Wikipedia says. That October it decided not to apply to a government-backed plan to merge Taiwan’s DRAM makers into a single Taiwan Memory Company. Production moved to 42-nanometre DDR3, developed with Micron, in 2010. In 2012 Nanya split its 8-inch wafer business into a separate foundry company, whose plant was sold in 2014.

The partnership with Micron ended in a share swap. In November 2016 Nanya’s board approved taking a stake of about 5 percent in Micron through new shares, as part of Micron’s buyout of the 67 percent of Inotera it did not already own, the Taipei Times reported; Nanya sold its 24.2 percent Inotera stake and gained an option to license Micron’s next-generation DRAM processes. The paper said the deal would make Nanya Micron’s largest shareholder. Both steps were completed in December 2016, according to Chinese-language Wikipedia, and Inotera’s plants passed to Micron.

From then on Nanya concentrated on its own fabs. It began volume production of 8Gb DDR4 on a 20-nanometre process in December 2017, and in January 2020 announced a 10-nanometre-class DRAM cell technology developed in-house, ending its reliance on licensed processes, the same source says.

Design and documentation.

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.

Mature memory from Taishan.

Nanya’s headquarters and main production base are in the Nanlin Science Park in Taishan District, New Taipei, where a new head office opened in August 2017, Chinese-language Wikipedia says; in 2016 the Taipei Times still described the company as Taoyuan-based. A new 12-inch fab in the same park, known as Fab 5A, broke ground on 23 June 2022. In August 2026 the board approved a spending plan for the fab through 2029 that brings in extreme ultraviolet lithography for the first time, with first wafers now set for the second half of 2027, according to the same source. Nanya also runs design centres in Vermont and Texas in the United States.

The product range is broad and leans to established standards. The company lists standard DRAM from DDR2 to DDR5, low-power DRAM from LPDDR2 to LPDDR5X, known-good die, multi-chip packages and memory modules, alongside its Elixir modules, and names uses in digital televisions, set-top boxes, networking gear, security systems, drones, tablets, cars and industrial equipment. Nanya says it “aims to be the best memory solution provider” and calls itself “a stable and trustworthy company.” Chinese-language Wikipedia says the company has chosen not to make mainstream high-bandwidth memory, working instead on customised memory for edge AI devices, and that in October 2024 it announced joint development of a vertical-channel-transistor DRAM with Kioxia, presented at the IEDM conference that December.

Its ownership has widened. Nan Ya Plastics remains the largest shareholder, Chinese-language Wikipedia says, and in March 2026 Nanya agreed a private placement with four customers — Sandisk, Kioxia, Solidigm and Cisco — which was completed in April 2026, left them with about a tenth of the enlarged share capital and came with multi-year supply contracts.

For a design guide, Nanya Technology shows how a memory maker can carry a parent group’s name while its technology passes through a chain of partners and then comes in-house. Compare Micron, its partner for most of two decades, and Qimonda, the German partner that did not survive 2009. For this guide we use an ink navy, a wafer grey and a cool cyan with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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