IN BRIEF : EC Restricts Microchip Marketing

The European Community today introduced strict new rules affecting access to EC markets for microchips in a move that diplomats said could intensify U.S. and Japanese charges of protectionism.

The EC’s executive commission said in a statement that the regulation requires a crucial high-technology stage in the manufacture of microchips to take place in the community for them to be considered “made in the EC.”

Defining the origin of the wafer-thin semiconducting circuits, which are at the heart of computers and most modern electronic products, is important because any EC business importing them as components must pay duty on non-EC microchips.

The EC said that for a microchip to count as EC-made, a process known as diffusion must take place in the community. Diffusion is the complex and costly procedure of imprinting the pattern of the microcircuit on wafers of silicon.

That would exclude microchips that are assembled in the community from wafers diffused elsewhere, the practice of some, but not all, of the big U.S. and Japanese manufacturers.

“It has been established that the diffusion stage is technically the most complex, the most difficult and that which requires the biggest investment in research,” the commission said in its statement to justify the decision.

Some non-EC microchip manufacturers already carry out diffusion in the community, including Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola Inc. and Japan’s NEC Corp. So do big EC producers such as NV Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken of the Netherlands, West Germany’s Siemens AG and Britain’s Plessey Co. PLC.