Susumu Koike is holding court over lunch at the Kyoto, Japan, offices of Matsushita Semiconductor, the company he heads. Matsushita Semiconductor is a subsidiary of $62-billion-a-year Matsushita Electric Industrial, the world's second-largest consumer electronics manufacturer (behind Sony), whose product lines include Panasonic, Technics, and Quasar. A pugnacious 58-year-old engineer, Koike describes one of Matsushita's latest achievements this way: "Reconfigurable FeRAM is our Mount Everest."

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