Establishment of Next-Generation Semiconductor Research Center at SUNY

A next-generation semiconductor R & D center will be established at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, New York.

On July 18, the New York Times reported that International SEMATECH, a consortium of 12 semiconductor-manufacturing companies, and the state of New York agreed to construct an R & D center at SUNY with an investment of $4 million.

The consortium was first made in the 1980s to prevent Japanese companies from dominating the global semiconductor market by American companies such as IBM, Intel, Motorola, Hewlett Packard, Texas Instruments and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). In 1990s, Korea’s Hynix, Philips, a Dutch company, Infineon Technologies, a German one, France’ STMicroelectronics, and Taiwan’s TSMC additionally joined the consortium. Those companies are competing with each other in the design of computer chips while they do research and development projects with each other and also work together in setting industrial standards and manufacturing compatible computer chips. In the late 1980s, International SEMATECH established a semiconductor R & D center at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas and it has run it.

New York governor George Pataki said, “The new research center is expected to help the economy in New York picking up like the case in Austin. But the New York Times quoted an official in the industry as saying that it was difficult to expect high economic growth effect from the new center in that the situation had changed a lot since the 1980s.

konihong@donga.com