VLSI Revisited - Revival in Japan

This paper describes the abundance of semiconductor consortia that have come into existence in Japan since the mid-1990s. They clearly reflect the ambition of the government - through its reorganized ministry METI and company initiatives - to regain some of the industrial and technological leadership that Japan has lost. The consortia landscape is very different in Japan compared with EU and the US. Outside Japan the universities play a much bigger and very important role. In Europe there has emerged close collaboration, among national government agencies, companies and the EU Commission in supporting the IT sector with considerable attention to semiconductor technologies. Another major difference, and possibly the most important one, is the fact that US and EU consortia include and mix partners from different areas of the semiconductor landscape including wafer makers, material suppliers, equipment producers and integrated device makers.semiconductors, Hitachi, Sony, Toshiba, Elpida, Renesas, Sematech, VLSI, JESSI, MEDEA, ASPLA, MIRAI, innovation system

Sending Jobs Overseas: The Cost to America’s Economy and Working Families

[Excerpt] This report was created by Working America and the AFL-CIO as a companion piece to Work­ing America’s Job Tracker, a ZIP code –searchable database of jobs exported (as well as Occupational Safety and Health Act violations and other work­place issues). Users can search their area for com­panies that have sent jobs overseas. Though Job Tracker is one of the largest publicly available, fully searchable records of the extent and specifics of outsourcing, it only reveals the tip of the iceberg. This report and Job Tracker contextualize each other—Job Tracker by mapping specific job losses due to outsourcing, the report by taking a broad view of the national-level numbers that are avail­able and offering case studies of key industries