* PCO Inc., a Chatsworth company that...

* PCO Inc., a Chatsworth company that makes components for fiber-optic technology, said it appointed Sanford L. Kane, 48, as its president and chief executive.

Kane is best known as the former president and chief executive of U.S. Memories, a short-lived joint venture of U.S. companies to make basic computer chips called DRAMs, or dynamic random access memory chips.

The joint venture’s original $1-billion business plan was to challenge Japanese superiority in chip-making.

But U.S. Memories folded in January when Kane said he had been unable to find any additional investors beyond the seven original joint venturers, which included International Business Machines, Digital Equipment, Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

Before joining U.S. Memories, Kane was division vice president of industry operations for IBM, where he helped form Sematech, a government-supported microchip research consortium.

PCO, a joint venture of Corning Inc. and IBM, makes optoelectronic interfaces for fiber-optic technology.