Radical Collaboration: Ibm Microelectronics Joint Development Alliances

Case Data

With an exponential growth of technology advancement in transistor components and competition in the market within a spec of time had a drastic change in Semiconductor industry. Since the rapid adoption of the modern day chip in the 1960s most companies involved in producing semiconductors were extremely vertically integrated, with all aspects of business tightly controlled. Semiconductor companies owned and operated their own fabrication plants and also the processing technologies that facilitated in creating the chips. Research, design, testing, production, and manufacturing were all kept "in house". Advances in the semiconductor industry made the market extremely competitive, companies began to use a technology roadmap that helped pave goals for the industry to set its eyes on, 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 quicker 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. In order to produce faster chips, companies raced to make transistors smaller in order to pack more of them on the same size silicon, 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. As of 2011 most cutting edge processor makers are working in the 32 nm levels and heading into full...