>>20207604>I just heard that Japan agreed to step off semiconductor productionNo, Japan's semiconductor industry woes aren't tied to the Plaza Accord nor any deal with the US to stop developing it. In fact, Japan has had a big part in semiconductor supply chain this whole time(more on this later. They have always been doing well in supplying clean room equipment, chemicals, and the machines that store and distribute said chemicals. However, on the FAB side of things they fell off the proverbial face of the earth when they banked on using their home grown litho machines instead of following the industry trends. This is why they are no longer around. They couldn't produce the smaller nodes like their competitors--see picrel, japan actually had leading edge fabs until 2010.
What you see now is that Japan is paying both IBM and TSMC to come to Japan to help Japan build their next gen FABs. If the US was against this, none of this would happen. However, the reason why Japan basically HAS to try to restart their semiconductor manufacturing industry is because the japanese companies that have been supplying FABs globally are losing sales because everyone is using their own domestic products or have started developing their own domestic supplies they otherwise bought from Japan. In order to save these companies from going under and lose out on billions in revenue and tens of thousands of high wage tech jobs, Japan is trying to build domestic semiconductor manufacturing so they can buy their own product to try to keep these companies alive.
