Tokyo

Looking for integration: Japanese companies want to work with government to develop chips.

A group of leading Japanese electronics companies has proposed a joint industry–government programme to develop next-generation semiconductor technology for the emerging system-on-a-chip (SoC) industry.

The proposal includes a plan to establish technical standards to enable intellectual-property components from different sources to be mixed and matched, which is necessary for the building of custom SoCs embedded within complex systems.

The move reflects a feeling within Japan's semiconductor industry — which once dominated more than half the world market — that the recent technological and industrial shift towards logic-based products may lead to a further decline in its world share, which has dropped to 25 per cent.

The proposal was made by Semiconductor Industry Research Institute Japan (SIRIJ), an organization funded by leading Japanese semiconductor manufacturers, including Fujitsu, Hitachi, Matsushita, Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Oki Electric Industry, Rohm, Sanyo, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba, to promote industrial research into silicon semiconductor technology.

The programme would involve all the companies involved in SIRIJ, and is expected to obtain support from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to set up a core research centre in 2001.

The programme would be modelled on Project Alba in Scotland, which brought together Scottish Enterprise — a government economic development body — and universities and industry from both within and outside Scotland to promote the research and development (R&D) of SoC technology.

Although MITI says that the proposal is “not yet on the official agenda”, industry sources say the plan is expected to be finalized by the end of this year and to be announced officially next spring.

“The Japanese semiconductor industry was slow to respond to paradigm changes in both technology and the market, as well as intensifying competition from Asian and US companies,” says Tsuguo Makimoto, former director of Hitachi, who was instrumental in drawing up the proposal.

Makimoto points out that Japan became too complacent about its dominance in memory-based technology, such as DRAM chips, in the 1980s. As a result, it “made very little effort in R&D for semiconductor technology for nearly a decade, while the rest of the world moved on”.

As the global semiconductor industry makes a shift towards highly integrated devices for digital information products, the development of SoC technology, which enables complex systems to be put onto a single piece of silicon, is seen as crucial.

Over the next five years, advances in technology may allow up to 200 million transistors to be placed on a single chip, yet few companies have the intellectual property or technology to use this capacity.

“In addition to legal and technological challenges, the lack of adequate human resources is a serious problem for the Japanese semiconductor industry,” says Makimoto.

He says that Japan needs an organization similar to the US Semiconductor Technology Council to oversee policies in semiconductor research, as well as a central institution to promote joint industry–university research and to design new curricula at universities. “In short, we have to forget our past glories and start everything from scratch,” says Makimoto.