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Semiconductor consolidation is the recent 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. ==History== 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 became 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 overhaul 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 60's 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. () The process at which most of these intricate chips are being produced at is called photolithography, and the cost of equipment and operating them has grown astronomically resulting in an inevitable consolidation of semiconductor companies. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Semiconductor consolidation」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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