IBM Japan touts role in ThinkPad design

Electronic News, Nov 2, 1992 by Brooke Crothers

TOKYO--As IBM tries to breathe new life into its portable PC operations with the new ThinkPad notebooks (EN, Oct. 12), the company's Japan operations are taking on increased significance in the company's portable computing strategy.

Company officials at rollouts here and in the U.S. were quick to point out IBM Japan's role in ThinkPad development and manufacturing. "Much of the development work was done at Yamato," Arimasa Naito, manager at the Portable Products Development division of IBM Japan, said in reference to the Yamato research center in Kanagawa.

Mr. Naito added that IBM's Yasu is making key ThinkPad components such as motherboards, while manufacture of the system's removable 2.5-inch 120 hard disk drives is taking place at IBM's Fujisawa plant in Kanagawa.

IBM Japan also was at the helm in designing new 3.3-mm-thick LAN cards that can be used with the ThinkPads. Introduced in the U.S. in September (EN, Sept. 21), the Token Ring and Ethernet 10base2 and 10baseT PCMCIA cards are about one-fourth the size of standard LAN adapter cards.

"The surface mount technology that was essential to making this a commercial reality was handled by our Yasu factory," said Tatsuroh Ishikawa, a manager in IBM's Personal Systems Development division. Mr. Ishikawa said IBM's "surface laminar circuit" technology allowed it to achieve a minimum substrate thickness of 0.76 mm. He also pointed to a critical surface-mounted gate array sitting at the center of the board.

Despite IBM Japan's role in the ThinkPad project, others question its position in future product developments. "I think all this ThinkPad activity in Japan is due to Mii's influence," said Yasuhiko Arai, a computer analyst at Nomura Research Institute in Yokohama, referring to Nobuo Mii, who once headed IBM Japan's operations and is now a vice president at IBM in the U.S.

"I don't see places like Fujisawa playing a very big role in the future," he continued. "IBM will be looking elsewhere...there will be notebooks, for instance, coming from Zenith." This is consistent with IBM statements made when the company took a stake in Zenith parent Groupe Bull last winter (EN, Feb. 3), and an IBM spokesman in the U.S. last week confirmed the ThinkPad 300 is being built to IBM specs by Zenith.

Mr. Arai added other ThinkPad parts are coming from outside vendors. "I understand the motherboards are coming from a variety of sources, as are other components," he said without elaboration.