Solid state: Memories amass more data per chip, while several companies ready the first nonoptical lithography machines

Historically the semiconductor industry was primarily a U.S. industry. By the end of 1982, however, Japan had secured 35 percent of the world market, compared with 55 percent for the United States. Much of the increase, and most of Japan's growth in 1983, came from sales of 64-kilobit random-access memories: approximately two thirds of those sold so far have been made by Japanese companies. In September 1983, however, a U.S. company grabbed the semiconductor headlines when the IBM Corp. announced an experimental 512-kb RAM with the greatest storage capacity on a RAM chip yet retorted.