In 1970 the pre-eminent Japanese IC companies were
Sasaki, an academic as well as an industrialist, was a legend in the Japanese technology industry with an energy and intellectual fizz that had earned him the nickname 'Dr Rocket'. He told Kawanishi to go for CMOS manufacturing.
Sasaki was not being altruistic. His vision for Sharp was that it should make portable products. It then made calculators. Only CMOS circuitry would get Sharp to being able to manufacture a portable calculator, and he needed a source of CMOS ICs.
Toshiba struggled to make CMOS chips. "The yield was very low", said Kawanishi about the early efforts. But gradually Toshiba mastered the art and, by the mid-80s, had the finest CMOS process in the world.
Fortunately for Toshiba, at about that time the whole world went CMOS, with CMOS replacing NMOS as the industry's mainstream IC process technology.
In the late '80s, Toshiba got a 1Mbit CMOS DRAM into volume production a full six months before anyone else, making a fabulous amount of money in the process.
When Siemens Semiconductor ran into trouble in 1985 trying to play catch-up in IC technology, under the EC-backed Megaproject, it turned to Toshiba to solve its problems.
The meeting of Kawanishi and Sasaki in 1970, laid the foundations for many decades of success in the semiconductor business for Toshiba.
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