90年代のシリコンアイランド九州のIC産業

抄録

This paper has attempted an analysis of the actual state of “Silicon Island” Kyushu's integrated circuit industry during the 1990s. The results of this analysis have revealed the following facts.
(1) The integrated circuit industry once served as the leading industry in the fueling of Kyushu's industrial economy. However, Japan's integrated circuit industry found itself in difficult straits with the onset of the 1990s. The consequent sluggish growth also had a retarding effect on Kyushu's integrated circuit industry. The upshot was that hardly any change was visible in the number of integrated circuit plants as of the mid-1990s, while the number of personnel employed in the industry has tended to decline.
(2) Hence, although Kyushu's integrated circuit industry had accounted for 40% of the national production volume and 30% of the national production economic yield up to the onset of the 1990s, these figures had turned to 30% for both production volume and production yield alike by the close of the 1990s. This significant drop in production volume was due to lackluster growth in MOSIC. Kyushu, in particular, was hit by a significant decline in the production volume of MOS memory IC.
(3) In consequence, despite its erstwhile reputation as “the memory Mecca, ” Kyushu saw its share of the memory market dwindle faster than anywhere else in the nation as the trend away from DRAM gained momentum. On the other hand, the end of the 1990s saw the MOS logic IC account for nearly half of production yields, signaling that MOS logic IC had replaced memory as the mainstay product. At the same time, linear IC increased its share to account for more than 50% of production volume and constitute the prime force in these developments.
(4) Major plants in Kyushu began to introduce system LSI and concentrated production on the most advanced articles in linear IC and memory, with the result that the average Kyushu unit price for memory began to exceed the national average as of 1993, while average Kyushu unit prices for logic and linear ICs topped the national average as of 1996.
(5) The 1990s also saw a marked surge in IC trading. Both import and export figures for Kyushu increased at a far greater pace than increases elsewhere nationwide, so much so that Kyushu's export figures leapt to nearly 20% of the national performance by 1999 from under 5% at the beginning of the decade. Similarly, import figures rose to constitute well over 10% of the national figure.
(6) Such burgeoning IC trading has also led to a rise in an international division of labor on a process-by-process basis, whereby plants in Kyushu work in harness with plants overseas, with Kyushu exporting semiprocessed products (finished wafers). Such process-sharing has made particular headway with various nations in Asia, notably Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and China. In addition, Kyushu's IC plants are making a positive effort to serve as mother plants to these overseas plants by providing the transfer of mass-production technology, training, and instruction, among other support initiatives.