Samsung Completes New Chip Line in US

Samsung Electronics Co. has completed its second memory chip production line in Austin, Texas, the company said Friday.

The production line in the U.S. will go into operation in the latter half of this year, churning out 16-gigabit flash memory chips that are used in such personal devices as digital music players and mobile phones, Samsung said in a regulatory filing.

It will invest $3.5 billion on the flash memory plant by the end of 2008. However, it declined to disclose the facility's annual production capacity.

The world's largest computer memory chipmaker has been running a production line there for dynamic random access memory (DRAM) products, mainly for personal computers, since 1997, company officials said.