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Decline of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry: Institutional Restrictions and the Disintegration of Techno-Governance

  • Chapter
Struggles for Survival

Abstract

In the 1980s, Japanese semiconductor manufacturers began to dominate the world market with three successive types of dynamic random access memories (DRAM): the 64 kilobit (Kb) (70% of market share in 1982), 256 Kb (90% in 1984), and 1 megabit (Mb) (90% in 1988). While the number of DRAM producers in the United States declined from 14 in 1970 to 3 in 1986,1 Japan’s world market share for all types of semiconductors first approached that of the U.S. in 1985, passed it in 1987 (48% Japan vs. 39% U.S.), and peaked in 1988 (about 51% Japan vs. about 37% U.S.) (Okada, 1989a, 2000). After that, as Fig. 2.1 shows, Japan’s share of the world semiconductor market began to gradually decline

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    Yoshitaka Okada

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    Yoshitaka Okada Ph.D. (Professor) (Professor)

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Okada, Y. (2006). Decline of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry: Institutional Restrictions and the Disintegration of Techno-Governance. In: Okada, Y. (eds) Struggles for Survival. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/4-431-28916-X_3

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