The island's government has stepped in to help the industry. Intel Corp. is reportedly mulling plans to invest in one Taiwan DRAM venture. Another Taiwan DRAM maker has severed its alliance with South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor Inc. And even one IC-packaging house has entered the bail-out picture.

But clearly, Taiwan's DRAM makers are still in limbo. For some time, they have lost vast sums of money and share. And there's no relief in sight.

As part of its plan to bail-out Taiwan's loss ridden DRAM sector, the Taiwan government proposed consolidating all of the island's DRAM makers into a single company. Thus far, the DRAM vendors have refused--local suppliers want to remain independent.

That, however, is ''no longer an option,'' warned Andrew Norwood, an analyst with Gartner Inc., in an e-mail newsletter.

According to Gartner, Taiwan's DRAM industry made the following headlines last week:

*''The Taiwanese government announced that it had allocated just under $1 billion in funds for local DRAM manufacturers that were developing technology with foreign firms as well as perusing mergers and acquisitions.''

*''Taiwan's ProMOS Technologies announced that it was ending its technology for capacity agreement with Hynix, opening up the way for ProMOS to restructure itself and work with other vendors.'' (ProMOS was making DRAM based on Hynix' process.)

*''Rumors circulated that Inotera was looking for funding from Intel and that Formosa (which has stakes in Inotera and Nanya) was interested in Winbond Electronics.''

*According to Digitimes, there was another rumor in the arena: Advanced Engineering Semiconductor Inc. (ASE) has approved a NT$450 million (US$13.7 million) loan to Taiwan DRAM maker Powerchip Semiconductor Corp.