Previous studies on the Japanese IC industry have mainly focused on the period since the 1980s. Moreover, studies on IC production before 1980 are rare. To fill in these blanks in the history of research in this area, I investigate the automatization of mass production in the Japanese IC industry during the 1970's. For this paper, I interviewed a former engineers of Toshiba and NEC who direct promoted or were involved in the automatization of mass production of ICs in 1970's.
The automatization of mass production in the Japanese IC industry started from the assembly process of IC production which had largely depended on the hands of female laborers. It had some characteristics, different from the automatization of production in other manufacturing industries in Japan. For example, the automatization of production in the Japanese IC industry was only weakly influenced by the Oil Crises. And, the number of laborers in the Japanese IC industry rose in 1970's, in spite of automatization.
Automatization of production in the Japanese IC industry in 1970's was incremental. The incremental automatization made “learning” or the experience of maintenance engineers more important, and there was a good circularity between automatization of mass production and quality control.
In the end, automatization of production contributed significantly to improvements in the productivity of labor, quality improvements, and pushing costs down. In particular, in late 1970's, big establishments turned out more advantageous in achieving higher productivity of labor than small and medium-scale establishments. In addition, systems of shift working were introduced extensively due to the automatization of mass production. In turn, these systems affected the share of female in employees in the Japanese IC industry, cost cutting, and the improvement in the productivity of labor.
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