Academia-industry collaboration to develop LSIs for smart appliances

Based on the authors' experiences, this article is to summarize a recent trend of the joint R&D collaboration between the academia and the industry in Japan, especially from the aspect of synthesizing system LSIs dedicatedly for smart appliances. To this end, first how the relation between the academia and the industry has drastically changed in recent years is surveyed. Then, the social backgrounds which affected strongly the academia-industry collaboration are also briefed, mainly because a series of dramatic events have just been occurring in the present university system in Japan due to the deregulation for admitting researchers in national universities to follow side business as well as to the corporatization of national universities. Eventually, a number of typical technologies attributed to the collaboration for developing smart appliances are introduced, and moreover, through the author' experiences of establishing and operating a start-up on the basis of the academia-industry collaboration, a number of examples of R&D output carried out essentially by young scholars and postgraduate students are also shown.