10) “Rocket Sasaki” and His Calculator Strategy
Picture A (left) : The former executive vice president of Sharp, Akira Sasaki
Picture B: The world’s first LCD calculator, [EL-805]
The biggest contributor to the IC conversion of calculators
was hands down the former executive vice president of Sharp, Akira Sasaki.
Moving from Kobe Industries to Sharp in 1964, Sasaki took a look at the calculators
that used thousands of transistors and diodes, and wondered, “With this condition,
miniaturizing the calculator and cutting costs will be impossible. To innovate
from business use to consumer use, implementing IC is inevitable.”
However, any semiconductor maker he approached to supply to his endeavor turned
him down, because all they had were preconceptions that IC’s were only made
for large scale computers. At last, Mitsubishi Electric, who created the [Molectron]
stepped in to support him; in March of 1966, using 28 bipolar IC’s, the world’s
first IC calculator, [CS-31A] was revealed.
In applying MOS devices as the next step, the Japanese semiconductor suppliers
were still hesitant, because even American manufactures were not successful
in this application. To combat this, Sharp worked with the IC makers to solve
the device instability problems, and it was only after this that NEC and Hitachi
supplied the MOS IC’s. [CS-16A] was finally commercialized in December 1967,
which used 56 Hitachi chips.
Sharp persuaded the semiconductor manufactures in and out of Japan in the
application of LSI’s, and developed the four-chip model [QT-8D], and the two-chip
model [EL-811] successively. In June of 1973, the LCD calculators with one
CMOS chip [EL-805] (Picture B) were produced and were highly praised with
remarks such as “creating revolutionary results in the calculator market”.
The sales point of “Liquid crystal, 100-hour operation, slim body calculator”
is even a topic spoken of today.
I met Sasaki in spring of 2007, and upon asking him about becoming 92 years
old, he replied, “I’ll keep doing research until I’m 100!”
American engineers once called Mr. Sasaki “Rocket Sasaki” for his innovator’s
spirit, which even now stays strong and unfaltering. (Provided by Sharp)
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