33) "Wanpaku-san (Naughty Boy)", Founder of Silicon Industry

 
Kazuhiro Maeda of Shin Nippon Chisso Hiryo (later, Chisso Electro-Chemical)

It is recognized by all that Japanese semiconductor silicon wafer industry is still positioned in the forefront in the world market, both in quality and in quantity. In the pioneer days of this industry, the greatest contributor was Kazuhiro Maeda of Nippon Chisso Hiryo (Japan Nitrogen Fertilizer) Co. Ltd., who played the pioneer role of industrialization. By his appearance you see in the photo and by his dynamic actions, he was called "Wanpaku-san", which means "Naughty Boy" in Japanese, instead of his real name "Kazuhiro", and he was liked by many people around him. "Wanpaku" is actually another way of pronouncing "Kazuhiro" in Japanese.

He started this project in the middle of 1950s, when Masaru Ibuka, President of Sony at that time, appealed to him, "Silicon is indispensable to semiconductor industry", so please establish domestic silicon industry in Japan for the sake of the future prosperity of Japanese semiconductor industry.
But at that time, the wafer diameter was only 25 to 28mm in CZ method, and 22 to 25mm in FZ method. Since there was no industry standard of measuring method, of which the contamination data in silicon was one example, and the data varied from company to company. To improve this situation, he organized the “Special Committee on Silicon Technology" inside Japan Electronic Industry Development Association, and made the standard of measuring method.
In addition, he experienced the difficulty of diverseness of users’ need, such as crystal diameter, electric conductivity, resistivity, dislocation density and lifetime. Answering in my interview, he sighed, "We had a dilemma between meeting individual users’ requests and cost increase."
(By courtesy of Makiko Maeda)

| To page top ||To Part 1 index

“Mr. Shimura’s Essays with Historic Photos”    Semiconductor History Museum of Japan
Society of Semiconductor Industry Specialists (SSIS), General Incorporated Association
Shiota Bldg 202, 6-27-10 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo Japan, 160-0022, Tel:81-3-6457-3245 Fax:81-3-6457-3246 E-mail:info@ssis.or.jp Url:http://www.ssis.or.jp
All the contents including the texts and the photos herein published are neither allowed to be reproduced, nor copied without permission of SSIS.
Copyright (C) 2016, SSIS All Rights Reserved