Mannerisms

Knorr's first response to his appointment in 1984 was to was to look around for help. Europe was about five years behind the US and Japan in chip manufacturing. The resources needed to catch up would be huge.

"The French were not inclined to work with Germans - they thought they'd be superior", he recollects, "but Philips agreed with our view that you can only get cost reduction out of mass production. You need to be volume driven, and you can only be volume driven if you make standard product. In research you can do anything - but if you're going for a manufacturing capability you have to be cost-effective."

Hence the Philips/Siemens 'Megaproject' to develop memory technology backed by the Dutch and German governments.

"The German Minister of R&D encouraged it - they had criticised Siemens for being a bank", says Knorr.

Siemens had piled up a cash mountain of some $14bn at the time. Between 1985 and 1993 the company poured $3bn of the mountain into acquiring state-of-the-art CMOS technology. Total CMOS sales during those eight years were $2bn.

Nonetheless, it soon dawned on Knorr that the timescales set by the competition for developing the 1Mbit DRAM were too short for Siemens to match.

Once again, Knorr looked for help. "We went to Japan and discussed with NEC, Fujitsu and Mitsubishi if they were willing to co-operate on the 1Mbit", recounts Knorr, "but the only person who was really aware of the possibilities was Tsuyoshi Kawanishi of Toshiba - one of the brightest thinkers in the industry. So we took over the 1Mbit from Toshiba."

Taking public money to develop the chip, then calling in the Japanese to supply the technology gave the German press a field day. "They criticised us heavily - they were crazy - they didn't understand", says Knorr.

"Toshiba was the master of manufacturing CMOS. We spent half a billion deutschmarks bringing up the Regensburg wafer fab and Toshiba taught us how to manufacture in it. But it didn't ramp up as fast as expected. We couldn't understand why a process that was doing so well in Japan wasn't working in Germany."

"We asked Toshiba to send over their best engineers. We still couldn't get the yields. We concluded that the trouble was the hydrogen peroxide used for cleaning", remembers Knorr, "so this was sent from Japan. Because it is explosive, the airlines told us they would carry only one litre bottles. Hundreds of bottles were sent over. Still it didn't work. We still had low yields."

"We had one chemist. A really crazy chemist," recalls Knorr, "he suggested that the stabilising solution put into the hydrogen peroxide in Japan - in quantities of a few parts in a billion - to stabilise the peroxide during the journey, did something to the process. We found out that this was the cause of the problem".

TOMORROW MORNING: TEN BEST BRITISH CHIP COMPANIES.