TOKYO — Intel Corp. is negotiating to make an investment in Toshiba Corp., as a way to help secure a stable supply of Direct Rambus DRAMs.

"Intel has offered us a proposal," said a spokesman for Toshiba, Japan's second largest semiconductor manufacturer. "They are interested in assisting funding Toshiba to support Rambus DRAM production. We are studying that offer at this moment."

Details of the offer have not been disclosed, the spokesman said. Intel has already invested $600 million in Micron Technology Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. to fund the development of Direct Rambus devices.

Toshiba's current plans call for the company to produce 72-Mbit Rambus DRAMs in small quantities at its Yokkaichi plant in Japan's Mia prefecture in the first half of 1999. The company will then start mass production of 128- and 144-Mbit densities by mid-1999. Samsung, NEC and LG Semicon plan to produce large volumes of Rambus DRAMs, starting at the 64- and 72-Mbit generation, in the first half of the year. Even so, Toshiba was one of the first companies to announce engineering samples of the devices last summer, and aims to be one of the industry's top suppliers, said Subodh Toprani, vice president of marketing at Rambus Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.).

Intel's discussions with Toshiba come none too soon as the industry prepares for the conversion to Direct Rambus DRAMs starting in the second quarter, when Intel is expected to roll out its Camino chip set, which will support Direct Rambus DRAMs. Direct Rambus boosts a system's memory bandwidth from the current 100-MHz to 600- or 800-MHz, depending on the speed bin of the devices. At maximum speed, Direct Rambus is capable of transferring data at a peak speed of 1.6-gigabytes per second.

Many DRAM makers, however, are still reporting difficulties in converting to the new technology. Direct Rambus DRAMs often take up significantly larger die area than SDRAMs, require new ball-grid array packages, follow a new module specification and require more advanced back-end test equipment.

Nevertheless, demand for the ultra-fast DRAM parts is strong from companies such as Dell and Compaq, and observers have said Intel will stand by its second quarter chip set introduction. To ensure a stable supply of the parts, Intel has been doling out hundreds of millions of dollars to aid DRAM manufacturers making the conversion to Direct Rambus.

Last year, Intel made a $500 million investment in Micron Technology to fund Direct Rambus development. And last month, Intel announced it would invest $100 million in Samsung Electronics for making investments in back-end testing equipment for Rambus devices.

As of now, Intel has made no announcements of similar deals with any of Japan's DRAM vendors, though rumors have been circulating for weeks that such an investment is imminent.