IBM Microelectronics

History

IBM Microelectronics took root from the opening of two separate facilities for microelectronics: a Essex Junction, Vermont, facility in 1957, and the Hudson Valley Research Park facility in 1963. The Microelectronics Division was formally organized in 1966. By 2001, its operations also comprised offices in North Carolina, Minnesota, Colorado. It also had a plant in Quebec.

The Essex Junction facility spanned 700 acres (2.8 km²) and was the primary site of domestic semiconductor manufacture for IBM before 2002. In 1966, this factory produced the first mass manufactured semiconductor DRAM, based on Robert H. Dennard's patents developed for IBM in 1966. Such chips were later used in the company's System/370 Model 145 mainframe (1970), IBM's first computer built entirely from integrated circuits, abandoning the core memory of old. Employment in the Essex Junction facility peaked in the mid-1990s, with roughly 8,500 employees. Meanwhile, The Hudson Valley Research Park facility in East Fishkill, New York, spanned 464 acres (1.88 km²) and was the primary site of semiconductor wafer and packaging manufacture after 2002.

In 2002, as part of a wave of major layoffs within IBM cutting 15,600 jobs by August that year, the company let go of 1,500 people in their Microelectronics facility in Essex Junction and East Fishkill. This layoff primarily affected the former, which had employed 7,000. Executives at IBM called the layoffs part of a restructuring of the Microelectronics Division, whose business was to move toward operating as a chip foundry on a contract basis, instead of mass manufacturing its own wares to sell onto the semiconductor market. A large portion of IBM's Microelectronics operations in Vermont was spun off into a new company, Endicott Interconnect Technologies (EI), in 2002. Another layoff the Vermont factory in 2003 reduced the headcount by 500, with 6,000 employees remaining.