Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • 29

1 Austin American-Statesman C5 Monday, August 1 1 994 This section is recyclable Intel sees success in battle with Japan 24 Hr. Dispatch FAA Air Carrier Certified C2HA51W 474657 Fine Coffees Teas Highland Mall Northcross Mall Austin Family Owned Company Since 1984 SINGLE PASS 3Smm FILM SCANNER 2700 6a RESOLUTION SIMPLE TO I OPERATE MAC OR PC SCSI DEVICE NIKON LIMITED WARR INCLUDED I UNITS ON i hl SALE INikon i 1 ELECTRONIC IMAQINO 4 FOR SALE USED I 1 NIKON LS3S00 SCANNER iu miim PRECISION rfjmmmm CAMERA VIDEO Approach Aug.1st-6th WE HAVE WHAT YOU NEEPIIl 466 DX-53, HPy 256K Ctcht 299. CO-KOWPHSplnMlftiml IH9. Epon24-pliiPotMtrtxrrlftUr 1119. SorylCD-KcmJsw SpuMamtniv 179.

WtnfTtk Up BtckupStretmlnt WOMet 199 Sale limited to quantities In stock. Sony, no rainchecki 2424 South Lamar 444-4443 urn sidering that just five years ago, U.S companies lagged 13 percentage points behind their Japanese rivals. The rebound straddles many trends: U.S. dominance of the mighty microprocessor and increased smart-chip demand for PCs over Japanese commodity strong-holds for VCRs and Walkmans; evaporation of Japan's lower labor costs and lower interest rates; strong U.S. anti-dumping legislation and challenges to Japan's market share from South Korean and Taiwanese competition.

But the resurgence tells the story of a chastened U.S. chip industry determined to deliver on its home-grown technologies. "Manufacturing used to be a necessary evil," Marsing says. "Now, we're in the hot seat. I've never had as many helpful ideas from the corporate headquarters on how to do my job." In the 1980s, Japanese companies took dynamic random access memory (DRAM) technology from the United States and flooded the world market with 64-kilobit chips that cost them 60 cents to produce in 1984.

The same chip cost $1.30 to build in the U.S. that year. Japan's manufacturing mastery "caused America to wake up," said Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research a San Jose, research firm that specializes in chip manufacturing. Today, the popular 4-megabit DRAM chip costs companies in both countries about $5 apiece and, this time, U.S. memory makers aren't missing the party.

Texas Instruments Inc. of Dallas has seen its memory-chip revenue soar from a few million in the 1980s to about $1.21 billion in 1993. Boise, Idaho, memory-chip maker Micron Technology revenue soared to $828 million last year from $91 million in 1987, thanks to "better efficiencies in manufacturing and higher price per bit," says Kipp Bedard, a Micron vice president Production has been helped by sophisticated semiconductor manufacturing equipment. The fine lines on chips are etched by photolithography, a way of printing patterns using light. Chipmakers have been able to shrink line-widths from about 12 microns in 1970 to about 0.6 microns today.

One micron in about l100th the width of a human hair. By next year, semiconductor companies expect to build chips using 0.25-micron technology. To be sure, these gains come at a high cost. With each new generation of technology, equipment gets more expensive and plants need more of it. Silicon wafers for 4-megabit DRAMs pass through 12 stages, each one depositing a layer of vaporized metal or silicon, imprinting a circuit or etching away ex-' cess material.

A 64-megabit chip needs 24 layers and today's microprocessors need even more. Limitation in the chip industry "doesn't come from physical barriers, like the ability to make nar- rower lines or thinner layers," said Gordon Moore, Intel's founder and co-chairman. "The limiting factor is economic." Plants costing more than $1 billion are becoming commonplace. Motorola and Advanced Micro Devices are building billion-dollar plants in Austin. Intel is spending $2.4 billion on plants and equipment this year.

A 13.5 percent increase since 1990 in chipmaker spending worldwide to $17.7 billion today is also helping U.S. makers of semiconductor equipment. Between 1990 and 1993, U.S. semiconductor equipment makers increased their share of the world market to 54 percent from 44 percent; the Japanese share eroded to 38 percent from 48 percent. U.S.

chip companies are expected to spend $9.6 billion on plant and equipment in 1994, more than double that of their Japanese counterparts. The gains came from "knowing what semiconductor makers wanted," says Warren Davis, vice president of the San Jose, Semiconductor Industry Association. Applied Materials is a prime example. Ranked seventh in 1983, the Santa Clara, company propelled itself to the top spot among equipment makers last year, beating Japanese giants Tokyo Electronics, Nikon Corp. and Canon Inc.

and more than doubling 1993 revenue to $1.08 billion from $502 million in 1989. Still, there are clouds on the U.S.-chip horizon. Asian companies, especially those in South Korea, are investing heavily in plant and equipment. Of the 47 plants in some stage of construction, two-thirds are in Asia, i convenient offers only the basic, squawky PC speaker. And speaking of the price it's too high.

The model I had was not the most expensive version. When asked about the cost, a Compaq spokesman pointed out that the ThinkPad 755c costs more. True, but $6,000 is $6,000. A desktop computer with the same features would cost about half as much as the LTE Elite. PAGEMART'S 6.

XL ONLY Hold 16 Message A Truly Great Buyl Call PageMart Today! 476-1404 MOTOROLA PAGERS ALSO AVAILABLE 95 a LKaMnM HUB fmlkxto jf MR, Justin Actto-StttcsiTiSn notebook price hardly MORTGAGE RATES BY FAX Mortgage Rates by Fax is a FREE 24-hour service. Get a complete listing of all rates offered by a lender delivered to your fax machine. Dial 416-5700 and enter a four digit category listed below. 1 Continued from C1 part is seeing Japanese chipmak-ers make the pilgrimage to far-off Rio Rancho, N.M., "not for the products we have, but to see how we run the factory," he says. Marsing witnessed the rout of U.S.

chipmakers in the mid-1980s when Japanese giants such as Hitachi Toshiba NEC Fujitsu Ltd. and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. relentlessly built bigger and better plants, "beating the living daylights out of us," he says. U.S. chip companies lost $2 billion and 27,000 jobs between 1980 and 1986.

Their plants were no longer capable of making the latest chips. Several memory makers went out of business and Intel nearly went under. Now, etching lines more than a 100 times finer than a human hair in "clean rooms" with air thousands of times cleaner than a hospital operating room, Intel is packing millions of transistors into a sliver of silicon about the size of a fingernail. Churning out these ever-shrinking, more powerful microma-chines for computers and electronic devices is one of the hardest and costliest manufacturing tasks today. And yet, Intel and other U.S.

companies are beating the world at it. For the first time since 1985, U.S. companies last year topped the industry, supplying 43.3 percent of the world's microchips to Japan's 41.6 percent And the United States is expected to widen its lead this year. That's some comeback, con Compaq's Continued from C1 tainly not at this price. One of the things I love about Compaq machines is that they are often blessed with features from the "Why Didn't Someone Do This Before?" category.

In the case of the LTE Elite, that means software that turns the power off and a built-in AC power supply. The latter is the most impressive feat. No longer are harried road warriors forced to carry the "brick," the external device between the machine and the wall plug. Compaq's engineers have put the part inside the LTE Elite itself; the only thing you'll need is the power cord. The shutdown software is snazzy, too.

No more closing Windows, confirming the close, waiting for the prompt and then hitting the power switch. Just click on the shutdown icon and then the confirmation button, and the computer powers off. The LTE Elite's ergonomics are almost perfect. The keyboard has a solid, clean feel and isn't too Gomfudex Comxittlnq and eSojkwcae. Custom applications for DOS and Windows In Georgetown 512-863-4398 a :4 Li 6678 Keystone Funding Inc.

4503 First American Mortgage 7878 Phoenix Mortgage Corp. 2096 TranStar Mortgage Corporation 4509 Network Mortgage 5702 RWS Family Mortgage 4508 ICM Mortgage Corporation 5678 Mortgage Processing Services 9101 Countrywide Funding Corp. 4 by Fax, call Jeff Simecek at 445-3861. screen, with the mouse buttons behind the ball on the top of the cover. This is my favorite pointing device design and was first introduced on the LTE Lite.

But this particular version is very similar to that found on Compaq's Aero subnotebook and apparently suffers from a similar flaw. After a day or two of usage, the arrow on the screen "sticks." Compaq has fixed the problem on the Aero by offering an optional ball with a textured, rather than smooth, finish. The 475CX model comes with a brilliant active-matrix color screen and very fast graphics that can display as many as 64,000 colors. For those who do fancy, video-intensive presentations on the road, the ability to go beyond the notebook standard of 256 colors is a real plus. But the Elite lacks a big part of the multimedia equation sound.

Unlike the competing IBM ThinkPad 755c, which has excellent audio capabilities, the Elite 451-5424 Computers NOW Be The ter-M-CLAs QUIRES TOLlL mm cramped. Battery life was good on a machine with a notoriously power-hungry active-matrix display. I averaged a little more than three hours with only medium power conservation. There are two Type PCMCIA slots for credit-card sized peripherals, or they can be combined for a single Type III. Software automatically detects and configures the cards when they are inserted.

The model I used came with a new Intel 80486DX4 chip running at a speedy 75 megahertz, a 340-megabyte hard drive and eight megabytes of random-access memory. The 75 megahertz processor is impressive. It was fun using a notebook computer that works at faster speeds than most desktop machines. That's as long as the application doesn't require lots of hard-disk access, however. I found the hard drive, which is removable, to be slow.

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