Word: chips
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...Americans feel about the outcome of the Reykjavik summit? Do they think the U.S. should proceed with full development of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or that sdi should be used as a bargaining chip? To find out, TIME commissioned a poll of 806 Americans by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. The survey was conducted by telephone last Wednesday, and has a potential sampling error of plus or minus 4%. Summit questions were asked of the 62% who reported following the issue in the news. Some of the findings...
Texas Instruments, which invented the first practical chip in 1958 and remains a major producer, is determined to help lead a U.S. counteroffensive. The company is rolling out devilishly tiny weapons, among them the world's first four-megabit chip, a supersophisticated semiconductor that can store more than 4 million bits of information on a wafer the size of a child's fingernail. Declares Norman Neureiter, a Texas Instruments vice president: "The U.S. semiconductor industry is not rolling over and dying...
...semiconductor industry got a measure of help last July when the Reagan Administration persuaded Japan to sign a five-year agreement to stop "dumping" chips at below-cost prices and to make its semiconductor market more open to foreign manufacturers. But the pact has stirred sharp controversy over its side effects. By forcing chip prices in the U.S. dramatically upward, critics say, the pact could severely harm the competitive ability of other high-tech industries whose products contain semiconductors...
...semiconductor business has seen slowdowns before, but the current struggle has been the worst yet. The problem has its roots partly in the electronics boom of the early 1980s, when sales of products ranging from personal computers to video games created intense demand for chips. Semiconductor makers in Japan and the U.S. vastly increased their capacity, expecting an annual sales growth of 30% to 100%. But when the computer industry's expansion stagnated two years ago, the resulting glut of chipmakers and chips triggered sharp price cutting. The cost of a 256K dynamic RAM (random access memory) chip, for example...
...Japanese companies have excelled most of all in the popular dynamic RAM chips, which are used by the dozens in personal computers and by the hundreds in larger models. While this type of integrated circuit was developed in the U.S., Japanese companies have proved adept at efficiently turning them out in mass volumes. Part of the problem is a difference in high-tech corporate culture. Says Richard Skinner, president of Integrated Circuit Engineering, a Scottsdale, Ariz., semiconductor-research firm: "In the U.S., the real glamour jobs are in designing the chips. But in Japan the manufacturing guys are equal." Indeed...