Pieter "Pete" Burggraaf

The sunny desert sands of Arizona have attracted silicon-based industries since the inception of the transistor. In 1949, Motorola set up a small, solid state research laboratory in Phoenix to investigate the new field of solid state technology. By 1952, its semiconductor development group began to manufacture a three-amp power transistor. Motorola's first mass-produced semiconductor and the world's first high-power transistor, a germanium device intended for car radios, was commercially produced in 1955. In 1956, Motorola became a commercial producer and supplier of semiconductors for sale to other manufacturers.

In Phoenix, Motorola built this early start into industry dominance in manufacturing so-called discrete devices, and eventually a fair share of worldwide leadership in IC manufacturing, where it is still number eight. The company's discrete device manufacturing capability was bought out by management in 1999, forming ON Semiconductor, but Motorola's worldwide IC manufacturing capacity is still significant in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area.

When Silicon Valley and other semiconductor manufacturers began to broaden IC manufacturing capability and capacities in the 1970s and 1980s, Motorola's presence in Arizona meant that the state was always one southwest location to consider. Often, however, Arizona lost to Texas and Colorado, but the state has captured a second-place share of semiconductor-manufacturing capacity in the southwest US. Among the other semiconductor manufacturers in the state, those in the top ten to establish wafer fabs in Arizona include STMicro-electronics, Intel since 1980, and Texas Instruments, which purchased Burr Brown in Tucson just two years ago.

High tech shines, too

Today, the presence of industry leaders Intel and Motorola in Arizona includes much more than just wafer fabrication. The greater Phoenix area is also the location of Motorola Computer Group (MCG), a business unit of the Motorola Integrated Electronic Systems Sector, and a leading supplier of business-to-business embedded computing platforms for use in telecommunications, network storage, imaging, medical equipment, and semiconductor production and test equipment applications. Intel's operations in the state include its wireless communications and computing group, home products group, Intel architecture products group, a validation and compatibility lab, the Arizona Development Center, corporate materials and services, and assembly test development. This combination of critical mass from two leading semiconductor manufacturers has recently produced a new cooperative effort that some experts believe may establish Arizona as a worldwide center in semiconductor technology for embedded systems technologies (see "World center for embedded systems" on p. S30).

ICs shine in AZ

Today, Motorola has eight wafer fabs...