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.
|