Internal Memo No. 22 From: Hiromu Ikeda, Deputy Minister of Industrial Technology Sector, Ministry of International Trade and Industry
(MITI)
Subject: SUPERCHIPS
World dominance in semiconductors will provide the basis for Japan's control of the global information industry by the turn of the century, which will be the key to our economic leadership and military strength. The critical path to achieving this lies with the coming generations of semiconductor technology-the submicron, giga-scale superchip. Accordingly, the objectives of Operation Market- share – 90 in the semiconductor sector should receive the highest possible priority. Areas of research should include semiconductor-grade polysilicon, silicon wafer production, ceramic packaging, quartz photomasks, X-ray lithography, supercooled Josephson junction circuits, and optoelectronic chips for optical switching. R amp;D should also be focused on digital signal processing, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), specialized dynamic random access memories (DRAMs), very large-scale integrations (VLSIs) for supercomputers…
"Walton, I can't make heads or tails of this gobbledygook." He tossed down the sheet. "What's this all about?"
"What it means"-Tam spoke up-"is that Ikeda has targeted every emerging area of semiconductor research. Everything. A clean sweep. If he succeeds, sooner or later nobody else will even be able to make the really advanced chips. A few more years and America joins the Third World."
Jack looked a little skeptical. Truthfully I found her extrapolation somewhat fanciful myself. But then, who knew?
"Tam, how about showing Jack that other memo? You know the one."
She didn't say anything, just turned back and sorted through the stack of yellow pages till she had it. Out came Jack's glasses again.