4 ms·

I live in Phoenix... Within biking distance of my house there are fabs for: ON Semiconductor Freescale and Intel We make a lot of glass here.

• copper 15y ago
  Phoenix and Hillsboro probably do the most volume in the US. I wonder what happened to TI's fabs, though. The reason that they are so centralised is that it costs a shockingly /huge/ amount of money to build and run a new fab. It makes all sorts of business sense to outsource fabrication, particularly when your own chip production volumes are nowhere near enough to keep fab utilisation at close to full. As for the super-complex chip argument, I'm not sure I buy it. Sure, Intel (and I hope, IBM) still run their own fabs - they almost have to, given the amount of control they require over the processes. However, all fabless semiconductor companies (by definition :) outsource - and that does include a majority of the chips you encounter in your daily life. Most smartphone processors are made in Taiwan, or somewhere close by.