This State-of-the-Art survey award will send Professor Jeffrey Frey, of the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Maryland, to Japan to survey how Japanese semiconductor manufacturers have organized their R&D operations for maximum efficiency. The study is the Japanese half of a larger study, sponsored by private industry (the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)), comparing the organization of up to five CAD software development projects in the United States. The overall objectives are to determine whether Japanese organizational methods work as well in software development as for hardware, to assess the likelihood of Japanese success in future software develop- ment, and to assess the current state of the art in computer- aided design (CAD) in Japan.
