home Resume Printable Version Company Descriptions Consolidations Factory Automation Industry Standards Industry Trends Industry Links Glossary contact me at: justin (@) deepdrift dot com Comments GyozaQuest is a non profitable site,	And then there were four: Image blatantly taken from Coriva's web site Thanks in advance to Robin, who probably put some time into this The irony about the statement above is that companies no longer think that innovation is a key to growth and success, the key to growth is through mergers and aquisitions. History And then there were five. A while ago Aviation Week and Space Technology, tracing the lineage of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop-Grumman, how from over a hundred companies, they merged to form only five major defense contractors in the United States. Look on the wall of many tech companies, and there's a diagram showing the progress of companies from Bell Labs to Fairchild and all the progeny, which started an industry. Although, the Semiconductor industry might not The story behind some of the largest semiconductor Companies in the USA and how they might eventually merge into about a dozen or so. Survivors: Intel, One of the Taiwanese (TSMC/UMC), One of the Chinese, One of the Japanese (NEC/Hitachi/NEC), One of the Koreans (Samsung, or LG), Either Philips/Infineon/Chartered/ST, IBM/Motorola/TI/AMD. Since Sony is already larger than the rest of this bunch, and Samsung is aspiring to be the next Sony. Micron Technology    Micron currently has most of it's facilities outside of Boise, Idaho. A city known as much for it's potato chips, as silicon chips. However they have a charismatic, homegrown leader, and have managed to survive to become one of the large players in the US. They almost bought Hynix, the spinoff of Hyundai's semiconductor division. Texas Instruments Believe it or not the are more of at technology company, than they are a manufacturer of semiconductors. TI is also the lead manufacturer of the SPARC family of microprocessors, which are owned and marketed by SUN Microsystems. So despite the expansive product line, and plethora of intellectual property they possess. In a sense they can also be thought of as a foundry as well. Even IBM has agreed that the cost of entry is so high, that they are better off utilizing the foundry model for their own Fabs. The Landscape WaferNews breaks the world into the following areas: America (US and Canada), Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and the rest of the world. Of course in the USA, There's fabs in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Oregon, Texas, New England, Florida and I even think New Jersey. Of particular typical interest is the story of a couple in the South, Dominion Semiconductor - Manassas VA Originally a Joint Venture with Toshiba, now owned by Micron Technology White Oak - Richmond VA Joint Venture with Motorola and Siemens - Siemens eventually became known as Infineon, who later bought out Motorola's share of this factory. Irony: I suppose the irony of this situation is that Adept, the Technical staffing company which got bought out by TMPW (the parent owner of Monster.com) is now in an anti-merger stance and stands to spin apart it's technical staffing arm. I guess it makes some sense as well, as I caught the tail end of the tech boom. Adept spent a great deal of money starting a solutions practice, so that in addition to sending people to work on the project, and sending project managers to manage it. That they could contract out the projects themselves. The jury is still out on the success of that. As when TMPW bought Adept, the solutions practice was spun off completely separately. Now TMPW's strategy of intern to CEO has shifted back to their core competencies. Somehow they figured that owning the job hunting web site, as well as the executive search firm was too constraining, and that the two entities would be better of independent, under their own identity, free to pursue their own plans. I'm still to this day trying to figure out just what all those companies were paying us to do in the internet age. Websites? I guess I did learn (sort of) how to run Dreamweaver, and a bit about web design. Thus it resulted me putting up this site. Although the jury is still out whether I have any design skills at all.