P.M. BRIEFING : IBM Says It’s First With Pilot Production of Super-Chips

IBM said today that it has become the first company to start pilot production of a 16-million-bit computer memory chip, which has four times the memory capacity of today’s most advanced chips.

Currently, the largest-capacity chips in commercial use hold 4 million bits of information.

A bit is the smallest piece of information processed by a computer and can be thought of as the digits 1 or 0. It represents an electrical switch either being turned on or off.

A 16-million-bit chip can store the equivalent of about 1,600 pages of double-spaced, typewritten text.

International Business Machines Corp. announced just last June that it had started commercial production of the 4-million-bit chip.

IBM spokesman Paul Bergevin said the company, based in Armonk, N.Y., has been researching 16-million-bit chips for several years. The company said it recently began producing the chips on a trial basis at its semiconductor plant in Essex Junction, Vt., on an existing chip assembly line.

Bergevin said commercial volume production of the new chip may be 18 months to two years away. All the chips IBM makes are used in its own computers.