When Robert Noyce invented the planer process, he used aluminum interconnects, silicon dioxide and lithography that, although used today, will have to be replaced with new technologies, he says. All of this is becoming an increasingly global activity requiring cooperation. As examples, he points to Japan's TEL expanding its manufacturing into a larger factory in Austin and Applied Materials with 50 percent of its revenues coming from overseas. Another example of the phenomenal ability of globalization to re-direct regionally driven resources is SEMI itself. SEMI went global in the mid-1980s because it saw the industry moving that way, according to Stanley T. Myers, president.
Direction also is taken from a global perspective.
Myers says that thinking of goals as local and global together makes cooperation profitable for SEMI members. For example, SEMI has regional advisory boards in key supplier countries to keep track of local issues and bring them to the attention of the international board when appropriate. Even regional organizations work with SEMI and recognize that the industry is a global business, he says. Executives even attend each other's executive council meetings. The SIA, San Jose, Calif., takes a different tack, one that some might say is less globally enlightened but much more focused on the needs of a specific set of companies.