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April 2005 -- Ever since Sony licensed Bell Labs’ transistor for it’s first radio, Japanese companies have partnered with American technology companies to produce innovative new products. Continuing this legacy is Tessera, which provides world-leading semiconductor packaging technology that enables electronics manufacturers to make their products smaller, more powerful, and more reliable. Tessera currently holds over 325 patents, and it’s components have been shipped in over 4.5 billion semiconductor products. Integration of Tessera’s technology is highly prevalent throughout the Japanese consumer electronics industry, and several of Japan ’s largest home electronics companies, such as Panasonic, Hitachi, Toshiba, Sony and Sharp use Tessera's technologies to improve the reliability, size and performance of their products.

Given Japan's enormous semiconductor market (in 2003 Japanese domestic semiconductor consumption overtook US domestic semiconductor consumption for the first time in over a decade), working with Japanese companies has been a logical match for Tessera. “Japan is a leader in new consumer products, many of which are highly miniaturized, so it (Japan) is a natural place for our technology to find it’s first home,” says David Tuckerman, senior vice president and CTO of Tessera. In addition to the lucrative consumer products market, partnering in Japan has introduced additional new business opportunities to Tessera. “Japanese companies," continues Tuckerman, "often give us valuable feedback on whether it (the technology) would have any issues with high-volume manufacturing that need to be addressed, and we work on those issues. And in the case of Toshiba, they made a very proactive contribution.”

Tessera and Toshiba: A Case Study in Collaboration
Since 1999, Tessera and Toshiba have partnered to build new business and revenue streams for mutual success. A major key to the profitable relationship was the open communication channels between the two companies. “We’ve continued to educate them (Toshiba) on our latest technology, and they’ve then taken that technology and optimized the assembly flow so that it was more amenable to high volume manufacturing,” explains Craig Mitchell, Tessera’s Vice President of Marketing. Such close collaboration worked to create a unique opportunity for technology transfer between the two companies, and in 2000 they reached an agreement that made Tessera the exclusive licensor of Toshiba’s memory BGA manufacturing process. This agreement has expanded Tessera's product portfolio and made Toshiba's technology available to a broad, worldwide customer base of semiconductor manufacturers and assemblers, providing Toshiba with additional sources of revenue and manufacturing capacity.

Evolution = Integration
As products continue to evolve, it is growing increasingly difficult to design and integrate multiple semiconductors into smaller and smaller form factors, with issues such as thermal dissipation, signal integrity, and power management necessitating closer collaboration between the chip designers and product manufacturers. Tessera’s history of strong partnerships in Japan has helped put the company in an ideal position to meet these challenges. Explains Mitchell, “We find that in the Japanese market there tends to be an open ear to the new technology we have available, and a willingness to evaluate.”

With increasing demand for consumer items such as digital cameras, plasma TV’s, and mobile phones, the future looks positive for both Tessera and Japan’s consumer electronics industry. “There’s such a strong technology base and legacy that I think Japan can continue to be the leader in consumer electronics for a long time to come,” says Tuckerman. “We certainly, as a supplier, look forward to helping maintain Japan ’s competitiveness by introducing new technologies that are available for licensing.”