Improving quality, increasing yield
Starting in the late 1970s, changes in the competitive environment increasingly questioned the ways in which Intel approached the manufacture of microchips. Japanese chip-makers became a major force in the microelectronics industry. Much of their strength came from manufacturing.
Japanese corporations fabricated higher quality microchips than their US counterparts. They also produced integrated circuits at much lower cost. Japanese fabs were automated and their managers gave greater attention to cleanliness than their US counterparts. As a result, Japanese plants had higher yields. In 1986, the average yield of Japanese microelectronics firms was in the order of 75%. This was fifteen points higher than the average American yield for similar chips at the same time.
Japanese firms could sell their integrated circuits at significantly lower prices than American corporations and still make a profit. Finally, Japanese manufacturers increased their production volumes (“ramping” in semiconductor parlance) much faster than US firms. This gave them a significant commercial advantage. They could respond much more quickly to customer demand. In contrast, American corporations did not have this capability. When the global demand for integrated circuits surged in 1980, 1983, and the first half of the 1984, they could not fill the customers’ orders. Sometimes, they had to redirect their clients toward Japanese suppliers, as Intel did for DRAMs in 1980.
Japanese strength in production was not immediately apparent to Moore, Grove, Noyce, and other Intel executives. In the late 1970s and even in the early 1980s, they explained [themselves] Japanese successes mostly through external factors: Governmental subsidies for research and development, easy access to capital, and the closure of the Japanese home market to foreign competitors.
It is only gradually that Moore, Grove, and Noyce came to the realization that Japanese firms had a competitive edge in manufacturing. They generally did so later than most American semiconductor executives. For example, Charles Sporck and Floyd Kvamme at nearby National Semiconductor understood as early as 1977 that the Japanese represented a major competitive threat. It also became clear to them within the next few years that superior manufacturing effiency and productivity were the primary.
In 1978, they discovered that Japanese corporations produced higher quality components than they did. This was a rude awakening, as Moore later recalled. “I remember Bob Noyce coming back from Japan where he had visited several customers over there and the thing that he brought back was the fact that there was interest in higher quality than the industry had been delivering. The Japanese were delivering products with many fewer defects than we had been historically. I remember he expressed considerable concern that this was something that we had to pay attention to.” In Moore and Noyce’s view, Japanese corporations had changed the rules regarding quality. It was imperative for their firm to reach Japanese quality levels.
In the summer of 1980, Moore learned that Intel significantly lagged behind US and Japanese competitors for another important metric: Manufacturing yield. These rumors were later confirmed by hard data supplied by IBM. “IBM,” Moore later remembered, “was telling us that our yields were way below what they ought to be and way below what theirs were. They generally would not share any data with us, but when I finally got to see some, I was shocked at how much better IBM was doing than we were.”
In the following years, Moore and Grove received more reports about Japanese prowess in microchip fabrication. An important source of information was Intel Japan, the firm’s sales office in Tokyo.
The American manager of Intel Japan was fully aware of Japanese production capabilities. He tirelessly campaigned within Intel, making the point that Japanese manufacturing lines had higher yields than American ones and that Intel had to close the gap in production. But his reports were received with considerable skepticism within Intel’s manufacturing organization. “Nobody believed him, including me,” later reported Eugene Flath, the head of component production at Intel.
— Christophe Lécuyer – Confronting the Japanese Challenge: The Revival of Manufacturing at Intel