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Semiconductor History | ROHM Kyoto — A Resistor Maker Builds a Chip Line
· 1970-10
Personal memoryBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Semiconductor History | ROHM Kyoto — A Resistor Maker Builds a Chip Line
kevin
Oct, 1970
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In October 1970, ROHM built a semiconductor plant on the grounds of its Kyoto headquarters. The move was audacious for a company that had begun in 1954 making carbon-film resistors in a rented Kyoto townhouse.
ROHM had started semiconductor development and sales in 1969, after earlier work on diode arrays. The new line turned that experiment into a manufacturing commitment: the company could now design a device, learn from production failures, and revise the process without treating fabrication as somebody else’s problem.
The good was the marriage of components and customer problems. ROHM’s integrated report identifies audio preamplifiers for cassette recorders as its first mass-produced ICs, and the company built a durable identity around customized analog ICs, discrete devices, and later power semiconductors rather than trying to imitate every fashionable logic or memory product.
That focus also carried a cost. Custom devices tie engineering resources to particular applications and customers, while an owned production line requires continual capital spending even when orders weaken; specialization is protection from some forms of competition, not from the semiconductor cycle itself.
The origin story also complicates a simple tale of Japanese self-sufficiency. In 1971 ROHM opened a development base in Silicon Valley, using proximity to the American industry to accelerate its learning, so the company’s domestic manufacturing strength grew through international exchange as well as Kyoto craftsmanship.
ROHM’s evolution was therefore neither a clean break from resistors nor an instant leap into advanced chips. It was a patient expansion from passive parts to diodes, transistors, integrated circuits, and power devices — an approach that rewarded process discipline but demanded repeated bets on factories and materials.
The photograph and pin show the present ROHM head-office campus at 21 Saiin Mizosaki-cho. The company moved its headquarters here in 1961 and installed the 1970 semiconductor line within the site, although the current buildings and production equipment are not frozen remnants of that first line.
Photo: Ritsuka, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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