How Japan Learned Semiconductors

In the early 1980's the Japanese were so dominant in semiconductors that my father had to take Japanese language courses at his employer, VLS Technology, Inc. just so that he could collaborate with his Japanese counterparts.

I worked in the DRAM industry for many years. It is pronounced dee-ram by everyone in the industry. I like your content, keep up the good work!

Those guys worked hard. Out of school in 1984, I spent a few months in Texas Instrument's Hatogaya fab (northern Tokyo, their first Fab, started in 1970, Miho in the 1980s). First VLSI CMOS ("CSAG"), 4.5 micron on a 3" wafer. We'd come to work at 8:00am and some would leave at 6:00PM, but Jibiki-san (who I worked with closely) would work every day until 10:00pm, when we'd finally go for dinner (usually Dennys, being one of the few places still open) and in bed at midnight, to wake up at 7:00am the next day and go again. 90 hour work weeks were common. The ethos in Japan (and I heard it repeated many times), the Nation came first, the company second, and personal ambition could be priority #3. And it worked for the country, it built the companies, and indeed it did build the people. Deming was a national hero to Japan. The focus on teamwork and refusing to let the ball drop as a team meant that quality was religion. Quality is what built Japan, and Quality came from hard, hard work.

As someone who grew up in Japan, hearing the rice cake saying was just amazing. The lack of research is what makes 99% of youtube channels trash - you are in the 1% my good sir. Thanks for the amazing video essays as always, love to hear about the industry as both my parents work at tech companies in Japan 🇯🇵

I've never heard DRAM pronounced as "DRAM" before. Always as "D-RAM". Probably to denote the difference between DRAM and SRAM, or Static RAM,

As an electronics hobbyist & chip collector, Japanese manufactured parts are well sought after for their quality, there are still NUMEROUS new old stock Japanese made chips manufactured in the 1970’s through the 1990’s, the 1980’s & early 1990’s being Japan’s chip manufacturing heyday.

Anecdotal: in 1980 I was the lead engineer on a project that required an early microcontroller. In those days there was no flash so the code eas “masked” in ROM - that is, defined as part of the top layer of the semiconductor chip at time of manufacture. It was an 8049 MCU which was designed and originally sold by Intel. But in the end we chose Mitsubishi, who were able to provide the mask at 1/3 the set-up cost and deliver the parts in half the time at a much lower price. I don’t recall a single MCU failure in the two years we built the device, over which time thousands were sold.

Having worked in the US electronics/computer_chip industry for 40 years (retired 2013) , I find these walks down 'memory lane' quite enjoyable, and I definitely did learn some things. Thanks!

"Japan's reign as king would not last for long". And such a statement may cause some to feel a sense of despair, or 'what's the point in even trying'. But the back room benefits are still huge: The knowledge attained, the growth in educational resources, the basic technologies and machinery to start a new adventure. That is perhaps the real reward.

I very much enjoy your work as someone who, from the American side, was involved in Pacific rim technology, specifically Semiconductors, for 35 years until I retired. Minor complaint: in all my work (including working on the JEDEC memory standardization committees) I have never heard it pronounced “dram”. The general classification is random access memories (RAM) with different sub areas such dynamic-ram (pronounced in two syllables dee-ram), static – ram (pronounced s–ram into syllables) And other varieties that are less well-known and substantially less successful. Maybe this is an American – centric pronunciation, however in my discussions with representatives from Toshiba, NEC, Hitachi, Samsung, TSMC and others it was universally pronounced in two syllables Hal Hanson Senior principal semiconductor design engineer (ret)

I worked for TI in a research group. I remember in 1977 we were have serious discussions as to whether semiconductor memory would ever replace core. The concern was that core memory would retain data, even during a power outage. TI's was putting it's hope in bubble memory. I think the incredible growth of winchester technology came as a surprise.

At 15:10 DRAM Dominance As a hardware designer (starting in 1972) I specified only Japanese 64K DRAM for memory when it became available because no board manufacturer wanted to set up the re-work post assembly streams needed if American DRAM parts were used.

This series of mini documentaries are só good, I wish I had found this series much earlier. It’s good enough to be part of an academic course (history of the electronics industry). My father did a strategic study of Japan’s electronics industry for Philips in 1985- concluding that Philips should try to merge with Sony. Philips wasn’t ready for such profound conclusion.. 👍😊. Thanks for producing this great content!!

"Bro chill" that one cracked me up. Good video as always my guy

Your research is very well done. Sure - there is probably an inaccuracy here and there. We all make mistakes. But that doesn’t take away from the general high quality of both your research and your presentation. You know what you are doing. By the way: I like your fine and creative humor on your slides.

17:31 Nice reference! I believe the original quote is "Nobunaga pounded the rice, Hideyoshi baked the cake and Tokugawa ate it" in reference to the final winner of the Sengoku Wars. Although, the industry is so fast moving who knows what the outcome will be in 10 to 20 years?

Anybody interested in the subject should check out a documentary series from the 90's called "A videohistory of Japan's electronic industry" If you look for the channel RC286 you can find it here in YouTube. It includes interviews from some of the people who were directly involved in this history, and was made by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I think it was originally on four VHS tapes, so it's a couple of hours all together. It has some objectively catchy episode titles like Circuits in Stone and The Calculator Wars. The fact that Japan could just arbitrarily reorganize what separate companies were doing, and tell them what to work on is interesting. The US economy just doesn't work that way. Back in the 80's, pretty much all Cyberpunk sci fi predicted a huge Japanese influence in 21st century because so many American companies assumed that the Japanese conglomerate alliances would be able to outcompete any individual American company. Go figure, that turned out very differently from what a lot of people expected.

I still remember taking apart my first transistor radio when I was a kid back in the 70's to see what these magical transistor everyone was talking about looked like.

Excellent video. I find all the content on this channel interesting and informative.

I recall the scare of Japan's 5th generation computer in the early 80s. It had the US fearing domination from Japan. As Japan had the technological capacity at that point, it was deemed dead serious they would be introducing systems that made existing big-time computing systems irrelevant and ultimately folding the big US firms. In reality, it was just one of the biggest forms of fear mongering as it never came to be.