STMicroelectronics: The Turnaround That Created a European Semiconductor Giant
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 เม.ย. 2024
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Still constantly impressed at the speed with which you manage to put out these high-quality, well-researched mini-docs.
Beware of those Asians. Then again, everyone should have one:)
Absent from this history is Thomson's Mostek acquisition in Nov 1985. While Mostek's DRAM business was flaming out, its SRAM and speciality products added a nice revenue stream to Thomson. Even more valuable was Mostek's patent portfolio. Upon the Thomson/SGS merger, SGS immediately shut down the DRAM business. Over the next couple of years SGS Thomson netted over $450M in license revenue from the Mostek patents. An important patent area was Mostek's pioneering work on ion implantation which SGS Thomson leveraged not only for the license revenue but also for its own internal use. I know this story well as I was an application engineer for Mostek from 1980 to Oct 1985 when UTC laid off most of us in preparation for the sale to Thomson.
With the race for DRAM density very violent at that times, how did SGS justify shutting down the DRAM activities? MK4164's were literally everywhere a dram chip was needed.
@@MichalKobuszewski Mostek's unit costs were much higher than the Japanese manufacturers for 64K DRAMs and we were losing money on each sale. The high costs resulted from a strategic decision Mostek made to produce the 64K with a process and design able to scale to 256K while the Japanese produced their 64K using a process first used to produce 16K devices. Unfortunately, Mostek's decision delayed the 64K market entry long enough that they fell behind the learning curve as prices fell from around $3.50 to $0.35 in 18 months. And to make matters worse, their 256K yield was never really up to production quality and that's why UTC closed us down in Oct 1985.
@@gdavids57 Thank you, it's really an honour to be able to ask someone so close to the matter. It seems like a sound decision that unfortunately turned out to involve higher risk than anticipated. It must have been extremely difficult to stay profitable and simultaneously advance the bleeding edge of technology.
One of SESCOSEM's planar-epitaxial manufacturing lines has allegedly ended up licensed out to Poland, kickstarting the coutry's abilities to manufacture somewhat modern semiconductors. Poland really struggled to keep up for various reasons - one of the leading semiconductor plants has been constructed next to the tram line, where it has turned out that vibration does not (surprise!) help in photolitography!
Yeah, I should have mentioned it. But the video was already stretching long. I will perhaps give Mostek its own video one day.
@@MichalKobuszewski "It must have been extremely difficult to stay profitable and simultaneously advance the bleeding edge of technology."
Well, there's a reason why there are so few companies in the field these days.
Pasquale has often been quoted as some sort of legend by the oldheads at ST. I had no idea why.
Now I do. Thank you
-an Indian ST employee
Hey bro are part of design or back office of STm in India ? Do you have any idea about ? What happened with sTM and foxxcon deal in India ? After vendanta go with applied materials semiconductor ?
@@svanimation8969 i unfortunately have no idea..
What a hell of work you must have put into this historical research. Not forgetting the 'Ndrangheta and Mafia threat to every public figures in Italy in the 80's.
Indeed. Amazing that Pasquale did not get a bomb explode under his car, like Judge Falcone.
Just a little correction, in this context, "società" translates to "company", not "society". Good video.
Si, e vero! 😊
Also true for the French "société "
Dude Asianometry's work ethic and his quality of content is off the charts...the stuff he makes is timeless
ST design office in Istanbul was one of the few (and best) places to work if you graduated in microelectronics related areas in early 2000s Turkey. Many of my friends had their first work experiences there.
ST moved that office under ST-Ericsson (a child company of both) which was doomed from from the start.
In mid-2010s they crashed and burned and later got sold to Ericsson.
The best translation for "Societe Generale" from Italian to English (and the same with Societe Anonyme from French and Spanish) is "company". So they literally called it "Semiconductor Company".
Your videos are always like attending the classes of a favorite teacher. Thanks!
ST Crolles is a real treat, every day I would watch paragliders sailing down from the mountain behind the fab. I'd also really appreciate if more cafeterias started offering little charcuterie plates
The Starlink base station seems to be a full STM design, from the teardown that I saw. Interesting company.
In 2000 ST Microelectronics bought Nortel Networks semiconductor manufacturing Fab in Ottawa, Canada in a deal to fabricate all of the semiconductors used by Nortel however with the Dot Com bubble ST closed the Ottawa FAB within 1 year after transferring NT’s technology to ST Europe. Only a few key employees found jobs in 1 of 2 ST sites in the US however by 2007 ST closed their Fabs in Carrollton, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona resulting in evacuation from North America.
Thanks for documenting this story!
I love ST, their MCU's are my favorite ARM processors. Great support from the demo software suite to the Nucleo devboards.
When we develop products, almost 90% of it would be from STM from regulators, analog front ends, to MCUs, op amps..
That was a really great history lesson - Thanks for presenting it so clearly. Love your work!
Thank you for having put this together. Excellent job.
Holy Moly. I will never get over how it is these companies can lose sooooo much money, and eventually eek out a small profit, then become huge. It boggles the mind. These histories are just fascinating.
Lots of hard work and a desire to make it happen.
also the same reason why olivetti didnt make it lmao
And without Chapter 11 😜
Persistence, and bankruptcy.
Its a win win.
But always remember these starrups give Good Money to its managers and employees projectants whereas established corporations give little Money to its employees and export income to tax paradise
Oh man, I would never have thought my home town would get a mention on THIS channel !!! 9:02 GREAT PRONUNCIATION TOO.
I cycled past this factory my entire childhood, great to finally know what was happening in there!
Love for ST! Always wanted to look into them. 😊
Not making fun of your pronunciation until we meet and you can laugh at my attempts to pronounce some Taiwanese names. 😅
Nobody will blame Asianometry for butchering some "European words" as he is not a native speaker of "European".
I love these videos but the research in so impressive. Thank you very much.
In the 1980 spinoff of Thomson-Houston & Co beside Alsthom ( yes it lost a h since ) for the heavy industry you also had Alcatel that got spinned off for the Telecom domain.
( it's a really simplified version, it's way more complex than that, but going deeper into the rabbit hole of the Nationalizations and following spinoffs is headache worthy... even for a French )
Interesting. I have a SGS-made Z80 CPU in my ZX Spectrum computer, so I recently looked the company up online. Thanks for providing much more depth to their history.
That was a complex one, I'm impressed, I thought I knew Thomson; but I learned a lot! Thanks
Thanks. This was highly instructive.
Your channel is top shelf! Thank You!
You had me at "alike in dignity". Well played, that bard!
The intro was epic!!!! Shakespearenometry
This is a great channel. Asianometry drives the point home in these vids, that the development of technology is always contingent on the people and circumstances that give rise to it.
I am using their STM32 microcontrollers based on ARM technology. This was quite educational to find out about the story of the company.
Finally, I was hoping for this.
Man that was an inspirational story ...can't believe he stuck through all those loses to see the light at the end of the tunnel ...respect
I worked a few years in 2010's at the saint egreve site, which was never part of stmicro, as it was the main army supplier in electronique. This site was part of atmel, then e2v and now teledyne, and still sell some mixed signal ic for spatial and military. Some of the older worker were regretting the good old days of 4000 workers doing little work for the army, but this was unsustainable and when 8 was there only 400 workers left.
I still call them SGS-Thomson, just to tick people off.
Last year I visited their Rousset facility for an engineering meeting. That facility is equally as impressive as the beautiful surrounding landscape.
9:05 when mentioning Grenoble always useful to remember that’s the site of the French military academy, and where all the defence r&d funding goes by default in France. It really does create a little European parallel to Orange county California in France, with that nexus of military investment and commercialisation, with skills development that feeds into the private sector.
One of my advisers at INRIA Rhones Alpes used to call Grenoble: The Alpine Silicon Valley. If I could rewind time I would stay there instead of moving to IRISA.
Wtf are you talking about? 😂
That was fascinating, I'll think of it every times I fire one of my STM-powered board, which is everyday ^^
Solid content as always.
Thanks for the video
Thank you!
As I just visited the TI plant in Freising i would appreciate a deep dive into the history there. Its quite a special plant build into a former office building.
Love your occasional literary flourish.
Fascinating, thank you.
Amazing story! 🎉😊
Italians dont get offended by wrong pronunciation, BUT beware if you talk about pasta it is a whole different story..
This is a great history that filled in the background of the name I remember frombearly career (sgs-thompson) through the habit called STM32
Thanks for the video. Had a horrible time dealing with ST during the 2021/2022 shortages. Guessing they burnt quite a few bridges during this time. 😢 it will be interesting how much competition they are faced with coming out of this phase.
ST has a very broad portfolio, this made managing the supply chains that more difficult. One of our products, with no immediate part to port the application to, had to be canceled.
What could they have done not to burn bridges when there was a global wide chip shortage affecting every client/industry/market?
You are lucky you did not have to deal with Broadcom. ST were sweet compared to them
Would the shortages have been better with NXP, particularly Kinetis? I'll never know because so much of the stuff we deal with is stm32, decided over the previous decade.
@@ChiefBridgeFuser Probably not. ST is quite ethical. Other companies are much more short term stock price driven and therefore will be much more ruthless when allocating capacity during shortages
I cut my embedded systems devevelopment teeth on the SGS ST-9 in the 90's - pokey 8 bit CPU, but good peripherals/timers/DMA - fun times
Would be nice to have a video on the partnership between STmicro and Atomera
My first boards with greater than 10k volume used stm chips !
Informative.
I honestly had no clue who this company was before other than their name is on the STM32F446 chip on the board of my 3D printer.
"because i like pasta" - Asianometry 2024
"Whew!" @ 12:14 doesn't state it enough.
Been a fan of ST Micro for decades. When I was searching for the best uC some 2 decades ago STM was the top performer. Arduino was so last Century, and I couldn't figure what the excitement was.
Agrate Brianza 🫰🏼🫰🏼🫰🏼 magnificent brother.
👍🏼😁
I really enjoyed this ultra-geeky story with so many twists and turns. Pretty exotic for Americans not accustomed to European style interventionism, I imagine. Ano ther similarly baroque story would be the rise and fall of Elf, the French national oil company, created by government bashing all the small national companies together. Later the government did the same for pharmacy, creating Elf-Sanofi and finally united the countries "biotechnology" companies under Sanofi Bio-industries. Quaintly, biotechnology turned out to be food additives, like gelatin, pectin and carrageenan, which is how I wound up working for a giant oil company in Europe's first seaweed processing factory, lost in the Normandy marshes. The fall of Elf seemed unthinkable at the time, yet their CEO wound up in jail, listening to the cries of his fellow prisoners. Another wild ride.
what's the painting used at the start of every video?
Thank You 73
You do great...
Amazing content as always!
Love French cities' name prononced with Italian accent haha
Ici c'est 🏵️🏵️🏵️
To be honest, I do make fun of a lot of your pronunciations to myself when you do these videos. I don't ever point them out because they aren't a big deal and just remind me how you aren't a native speaker and clearly read more technical english than you hear (which is particularly unusual and praiseworthy today)
The only correct pronunciation is REDNECK pronunciation... Because everyone knows the French can't spell LOL Like my name. ha ha
Bravo!
Remember to give your Italian transistors full voltage, once in a while. It's called Italian Tuneup. 🏎 Broom!!!😅
ST.. Spaghetti Teletype
Oh no
Thanks
STM my beloved
The mc68000 in my Amiga500 comes from this company
Can you do the history of S3 graphics?
the trick is to get yourself an Italian girlfriend. She will feed you with pasta and teach you the language. 😉
stm32!!!! Love those chips.
Wish STM32WLxx had a larger flash though, I hate having to deal wit Nordic
I started learning register programming to use some of the small mem chips. The HAL code is super bloated.
Also note the location:
a small town next to Grenoble where the Mayor at the time bought the agricultural land for more than 10 times their price,
because he had the idea of creating a small industrial zone..
.In 2024 the Local taxes levied have made the inhabitants rich ,who hire their children... at the Town Hall...
A "capitalism in collusion with the state" which generates "socialism"...
can you please make a video about Siemens/Infineon
Infineon or Siemens... good proposition
Ok Pistorio seems like a good story
And when Pistorio retired, Carlo Bonzati took over and the first thing he did was close all American Manufacturing Plants in Arizona and Texas.
Met Pistorio once or twice in the mid-80s.
Hmm 'silicon lovers' sounds like a way to describe Fleshlight owners
that e in silicone makes all the difference in the world
It's reassuring that a company can make integrated circuits while paying people a fair wage. I think we should move away from the slave mentality of the far east and produce what we need under civilised conditions. Hopefully the populations of Korea and China will regain a sense of personal worth and force change
So they went from coding spaghett on their olivett, to coding spaghetti on an STM32.
Salute to the wonderful Pasquale Pistorio!
Hello everyone, from St-Egreve ;)
7:36 'on which I leaned greatly', as they're things not people.
I love your mini docs there awesome always look forward to watching a new release. However can offer a shit sandwich 😂 as a native english speaker can i be rude and help you ? Niche is pronounced nee- shh. Once again awesome mini docs keep it up your content is spot on no one on here produces content like yours you have carved out a real niche 😂👍 oww as an added note your english is amazing i cant speak any other languages its very impressive your totally fluent. English is full of tricks with pronunciation the Americans get it wrong all the time especially the word niche, so dont be tough on your self 😂
I fucking love stms chips. One of the greats!
Could you do a video on Nokia ?
Atomera 🎉
i like pasta too. are we long separated brothers?
What an amazing man. After retirement, took up humanitarian causes instead of building a super yacht.
Wake up babe Asianometry just dropped a new video
i would argue employment rates are "not unimportant" even absent a "leftist bent"
it's generally understood that unemployment hurts consumer spending
So this guy needs an armored car to protect him from terrorists then proceeds to do mass firings in his company, some of which were the poorest and uneducated in the country. I'm sure that didn't help with the terrorist issue in Italy which I wasn't even aware even existed
I thought Europe Lost Semiconductors
if you ever need to know how to pronounce French words or translate technical stuff hmu, i will gladly help you! Also brandt was not thought of as an arms dealer, it had a huge consumer market and massive factories
Also know that International Rectifier either had or sub contracted manufacture in Italy at least in the mid 1980's.I wonder how this fits in with the companies in the vid. ( I have a pile of stud mount 40 Amp / 1,000 Volt diodes with IR Italy markings ) .
Your videos are golden, don't bother about pronunciation!
AKA the company that spams my inbox with a dozen emails a day just because I met them at a fair two years ago
For Indians who thinking foxxcon back off ! They didn't they just changed partner company they Chosen this company as there partner in india ! If u saw semicon summit in India when foxxcon CEO came he talked about that they didnt drop the plan of semi fab plant ! They were finding partner after that they give news that they are partnering with STmicroelectronics ! And at Same time ex Indian partner Vedanta partnered with Applied materials semiconductor ! For there own !
👏👏
😮
12:08 TEURS! You make wxceprionally too many videos :)
Here in catania we are very proud to have one of europe's manufacturing center! Not super high end stuff though.
To be or not to be.... Silicon Love. 🤓