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Concept
Semiconductor consolidation
Summary
Semiconductor consolidation is the trend of semiconductor companies collaborating in order to come to a practical synergy with the goal of being able to operate in a business model that can sustain profitability.
Since the rapid adoption of the modern day chip in the 1960s, most companies involved in producing semiconductors were extremely vertically integrated. Semiconductor companies owned and operated their own fabrication plants and also the processing technologies that facilitated the creation of the chips. Research, design, testing, production, and manufacturing were all kept "in house".
Advances in the semiconductor industry made the market extremely competitive and companies began to use a technology roadmap that helped set goals for the industry. This roadmap came to be known as Moore's Law, a statistical trend seen by Intel's co-founder Gordon Moore in which the number of transistors on an integrated circuit is doubled approximately every 2 years. This increase in transistor numbers meant that chips were getting smaller and faster as time progressed.
As chips continued to get faster, so did the levels of sophistication within the circuitry. Companies were constantly updating machinery to be able to keep up with production demands and overhauls of newer circuits. Companies raced to make transistors smaller in order to pack more of them on the same size silicon and enable faster chips. This practice became known as "shrinkage".
Companies were now in a race against each other and themselves to create the next fastest chip, as all goals were to meet or exceed Moore's Law. With the shrinking of sizes in semiconductors, production became much more intricate. Fabrication machines, which were producing chips at the millimeter level in the 1960s, were now operating in the micrometer and heading into the nanometer scale. , most cutting edge processor makers are working in the 32 nm level and heading into full 22 nm production; sizes comparable to the human DNA strand.
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