Two years as a public company, it said, had resulted in stronger financial performance, more innovation, greater intimacy in its relationships with customers, and substantial progress in a long-term cultural transition from a slow, methodical in-house semiconductor unit to a fearless, energetic and self-sufficient business.
houses semiconductor firms lacking their own fabrication facilities.
Even as the American consumer replenishes its over-leveraged balance sheet, economic figures continue to progress, with resumed strength in automobile, housing and semiconductor production.
The new Philips is a semiconductor house that not only designs and manufactures chips for its own product divisions but also sells them to Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia and other competitors.
In all the discussion of CPU identity it would be easy to lose sight of the fact that the A4 is not the offspring of either an integrated semiconductor house or a fabless designer.
Thanks to TSMC and UMC, Taiwan is now the world's No. 4 chipmaker and the second-largest (after the U.S). home for independent semiconductor design houses.
Dell, all the semiconductor houses and most pharmaceuticals are wallflowers.
It provided explosively growing markets for the companies making the transmission lasers and pump lasers, chiefly JDS Uniphase, and the semiconductor houses selling mixers, analog-to-digital converters and digital signal processors, namely Texas Instruments and Analog Devices.
"I'd go over to his house [to discuss semiconductors] and he'd be finishing writing a symphony on his synthesizer," says Thaddeus Roppel, an Auburn professor and early mentor.
Other major U.S. fabless semiconductor houses that have cut their capital needs and increased their speed to market by turning to TSMC for their chips include Broadcom (2000 sales: $1.1 billion), a supplier of chips used for broadband communications, and Nvidia (fiscal 2001 sales: $735 million), a producer of graphics chips.
