Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
In Europe, Malcolm Penn, CEO of Future Horizons, has been arguing for several years that the move to go fabless or fab-lite by IDMs is a long-term disastrous route for the semiconductor industry.
Christensen reckons that outsourcing fab is one of the ways US chip-makers are handing over a vital technological competitive differentiator.
Foundries are taking over more and more of the knowledge of the manufacturing processes, argues Chrstensen, and gaining an advantage in process engineering over US companies.
One company is standing firm against this move – Intel – according to Christensen.
“The problem lies with the business schools,” said Christensen, He says that their insistence on measuring companies’ success by financial metrics like ROI, ROE RONA etc, means that companies are sacrificing their long-term competitiveness for short term financial gains.
Only Intel has resisted the influence of the Wall Street analysts and continuing on its merry way, doing its own damn thing in its own damn way and remaining committed to maintaining superiority in manufacturing technology.
Brains exporting in the semiconductor business has been going on for sometime. In 1975 RCA transferred CMOS technology to Taiwan’s ITRI laboratory.
Fairchild got SGS-Ates, fore-runner of STMicroelectronics, into the IC business.
Philips contributed TSMC’s original process technology.
Toshiba got Siemens (now Infineon) into leading edge CMOS DRAM technology and Infineon exported 300mm manufacturing to much of Taiwan.
Plus ca change.
Spot on, Bitter, all good things have to start somewhere and a good thing is soon copied and that’s all for the best.
The UK started off the industrial (r)evolution, and exported the whole paradigm, technology and all, over the planet. What this shift meant to the world is beyond doubt?
Some riches for the historically opressed and poor asian people given by chance from the greed and incompetence of the bloated and arrogant western corporations is a Good Thing! After all, it is not ‘us’ versus ‘them’ anymore? We are all in this spaceship together?
Yes indeed george, as Lenin said: “The capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with.” Mind you he was a trifle adrift on that one – as things turned out.
I seem to remember that those who argued against this movement at the time were
told that they were “too dense to understand” or they would have embraced this
concept. I have a somewhat differing opinion of who was being dense.
The argument can be extrapolated to almost any form of manufacturing that began in the west. Technology transfer used to be the buzz word. I’d be interested in a study at Harvard that examines the negative effect of Harvard on the western economies based on the faddish crap they’ve been peddling in HBR these last 30 years.