Usually the equipment is rented, and returned to the owners. I spent 4 years in Taiwan working for OSE, a semiconductor packaging company (cutting up silicon w

Usually the equipment is rented, and returned to the owners. I spent 4 years in Taiwan working for OSE, a semiconductor packaging company (cutting up silicon wafers, bonding wires onto them, and putting them into little plastic SD cards or RAM chips labelled "Made in Taiwan"). The pick & place machines and ovens weren't owned by OSE - they were on a 30-year lease from other companies in Japan, Germany, etc. Software updates would void the warranty/lease conditions. One of my tasks was to write a program to measure yields for factory monitoring. This meant figuring out how to use SQL on Windows 2000, with no .NET framework or additional libraries. My guess is that when the equipment is too old, the original owners either take them back for salvaging, or sell off the pieces as scrap. I went to many scrapyards in Kaohsiung though, and found many treasures like $10 bicycles or old consumer gadgets, but no factory-level machines.