29) The Man Behind the Scenes of the VSLI Project
Shoji Tanaka, Professor at the University of Tokyo who ignited the movement
for VLSI Project
“The VLSI Technology Research Association” led by the Ministry of International
Trade and Industry (at the time) was following the footsteps of the NTT project.
Five companies - Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, NEC and Toshiba participated
in the project, and established a collaborative laboratory with the Electro
Technical Laboratory , and they worked on development of VLSI. Funds from
1976 for the first four years reached approximately 70 billion yen, of which
29 billion yen was covered by government subsidies.
Shoji Tanaka, a professor at the University of Tokyo, who led the electronic
material management board at the Japan Electronic Industry Resarch Association
was the one who really motivated and promoted the project. In the report,
"About Ultra High Density Integrated Circuits" in December 1974,
it was strongly appealed that Japan should be working hard on the development
of VLSI and addressed that the related companies should put effort to work
together.
Tanaka said, "At the time Japan was finally starting on the production
of 1K bit DRAM, and at the same time, the news of 1M bit was coming from the
US. 1K and 1M are different by 3 digits. I thought there would be no other
way than national projects to achieve mastery of this technology. "
Tanaka would then direct the national project of superconductivity development
as Director of Superconductivity Research Laboratory from 1988. The photograph
was taken at that time.
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