半導体産業は他の産業に見られないほど資本と技術集約性が高い産業である。1990年代以降、ウェハサイズの拡大及び微細化技術の進化が同時に進行してきた結果、先端技術の工場建設コストが莫大になり、技術開発コストが高騰したため、半導体産業の資本と技術集約性が高いという特性が一層顕著になった。そもそも、このような状況で、経営資源を豊富に有する垂直統合型企業（Integrated Device Manufacturer，IDM）が、よりその産業特性に対応できるはずであるが、現実において、1990年代以降の大手企業の行動をみると、それと正反対である。%The purpose of this article is to explore the relations between enterprise adaptations to industry characteristics and industry growth in semiconductor industry. The technology progress has been causing the semiconductor industry more capital dependent and technology intensive, while the chip price has been dropping continuously. Emerging enterprises were taking "down-sizing" and " concentration" strategies to join the industry based on new business models and new technologies, to deal with the feature of the semiconductor industry. Accordingly, the semiconductor industry structure has been changing its structure continuously since the 1980' s. However, the structure of each semiconductor industry country was different. In the common product field, USA, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, all these major countries took vertically integrated production system. However, in the non-common product field, Japan took vertically integrated production system which was different from the strategy of other countries. In Taiwan, the fabrication-less companies (fab-less) focused on one item production, so they could manage all the design specifications by themselves. However, Japanese IDM companies produced diversitive productions, so they had to outsource the design houses. Two factors influenced the competitive powers of the fab-less and IDM. The first was technology development and investment of foundry. The second was the inter-firm relationships in design stage. The foundry was more and more competitive in investment and technology, and the inter-firm relationship of contract design houses of IDM were losing their competitive ability. These two reasons suggested a fear that the potential of Japanese IDM competitiveness decreased continuously.
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