Japan's MIRAI project: An interview with leader Masataka Hirose*
12/01/2001
 |
Japan's MIRAI (Millennium Research for Advanced Information Technology) project, a joint venture of the government's Advanced Semiconductor Research Center and the industry organization Association of Super Advanced Electronics Technologies (ASET), aims to develop 70-50nm semiconductor production technology over the next seven years (see table). Budget for fiscal 2001 is $32 million (x3.8 billion). Roughly half the 100+ researchers come from the 24 makers of chips, tools, and materials who belong to ASET, including foreign companies Intel and Samsung. Another 34 come from the government's ASRC lab, and 13 are from universities. Below, MIRAI project leader Masataka Hirose details his plans for the organization to Masahide Kimura, an editor at Nikkei Microdevices.
The MIRAI project will not be like all the other Japanese national projects, because we intend to assign clear-cut individual responsibility, set specific goals, foster research talent, and, finally, proceed by a research philosophy of going back to first principles.
First, as project leader, I bear full responsibility for its success. This may sound obvious, but in previous Japanese national projects, it has not always been clear who was in charge. Plans and reports were written by committee, so no one was responsible. Decision by consensus limited real debate of controversial issues. In the planning stages of this project, there were the usual endless discussions that were not getting anywhere, so we changed the system. I took responsibility for everything from the assignment of people and the allotment of funds to the final decision on research topics. That enabled us to have serious, high-quality debate about the technical issues. Each of the five research groups in the project has one person in full charge.
 Masataka Hirose |
It has been hard to tell if some other national projects were successful or not because their goals were so vague. If they did fail, no one tried to figure out why. Sometimes the target was set so low it assured success, which did not do much to advance the competitiveness of the industry. We have set specific goals so we can tell if we succeed or not. And these are not goals that can be easily met, but real challenges both in terms of time and technology. Our research will be useless unless it meets market needs, so we aim not only to do the basic research, but also to develop practical modules integrating the multiple basic technologies. In three years, we will publish our first results and then check our alignment with the market.
We also recognize the importance of our human resources. Other projects have taken whatever engineers the companies have assigned to them. We interviewed all applicants and decided whether or not we could use them. We aim to create an environment where engineers can compete on merit; we treat all our researchers from government, industry, and universities equally, so even young scientists and graduate students can freely contribute fresh ideas. We will also evaluate their work and base their pay on merit, giving bonuses for the best results. The project will be very useful for developing future talent.
Finally, in order to develop practical technology, we need to get back to fundamentals and first principles. In investigating a new material, for example, we need to do more than just run some experiments. We also need to try to figure out its essential properties and defining characteristics. I believe the short cut to successful R&D is to start from zero, without assuming what has been done before.
Thus, we will not use commercially available equipment, but will design and build our own, practical since sometimes the equipment we need will not exist. Building our own tools will also help sharpen the scientific and logical skills of our engineers. It is too easy to produce something by just pushing a button on an existing commercial piece of equipment. There are too few opportunities to return to fundamental principles.
At MIRAI, we will make the engineer do more of the direct work himself — opening the door to the chamber and making the adjustments himself, for example — to try to understand the basic rules of how things work. This distinguishes us from the leading R&D organization, IMEC, in Belgium, which essentially uses beta tools from equipment vendors for its research.
Masataka Hirose is also director of ASET.
Masahide Kimura is an editor at Nikkei Microdevices, 2-7-6 Hirakawacho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8622, Japan; ph 813/5210-8311, fax 813/5210-8530.
*This article has been translated for Solid State Technology from the September 2001 issue of Nikkei Microdevices, our partner in Japan.