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Mark Durcan, Micron Technology’s President and COO, said during a conference call with financial analysts that the company would be delaying the production start of its IMFT joint venture 300mm fab, currently under construction in Singapore.

“We have made the decision with Intel relative to our IMFT fab that we will start that in the first half of 09,” said Durcan. “So that is a slight slip from what we had originally projected coming late in 08. But we think that’s just the right thing to do, given the current market conditions in the NAND market.”

The Singapore fab is the fourth 300mm facility under the IMFT partnership and was initially expected to start production in the fourth quarter of 2008 using 50nm process technology.

Micron executives also noted in the conference call that they were continuing to aggressively migrate technology nodes. Mike Sadler, Micron’s VP of Worldwide Sales said:

“We are continuing with the rapid cadence of NAND process technology development and implementation. Just two quarters after the introduction of our 50nm technology node, we have started our sub-40nm production ramp and this will proceed throughout the balance of this year. At this technology node, we have accomplished our objective of being on par or better than the competition with respect to both die size and operational efficiency.”

Due to the Singapore fabs’ original tool install schedule, which mainly fell outside Micron’s current financial year-end, capital spending for 2008 would not be affected by the production start push out.