Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "How Japan Won Lithography (& Why America Lost)" video.

  1. I think I told this story here before, but it bears repeating. In the early 80's windowed UV erasable proms were a thing. It was the time of Japan bashing, and accusals of their "dumping" on the market. We used a lot of EPROMs from different sources, and Toshiba was up and coming. We used mainly Intel EPROMs at the time. The state of the art back then was 4kb moving to 8kb (I know, quaint). Because of the window in the top of the EPROM you could see the chip. Most of us used this feature, when we had a bad EPROM, to get a little light show by plugging in the EPROM upside down and sealing the fate of the chip. Anyways, Intel and Toshiba were in a price war, so the chips from each vendor were about equivalent in price. But side by side in the UV eraser tray what you saw was shocking. The Toshiba chips were about 1/4 the size of the Intel chips. Yes, those "inferior" Japanese were kicking our a**es. Intel struggled along for a while, and exited the market for EPROMs. The "anti-dumping" thing had exactly one result. We could go to Japan, to the akihabara market (from street vendors!) and get chips with twice or four times the capacity of USA chips for cheap and bring them back in our luggage.
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  2. You already reached 100k???? Anyways, good video, well researched. Thank you.
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  3. Lithography, literally "stone printing", which is rather funny if you think about it.
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