Footnotes / references Financials as of August 29, 2024[update].[2]
DDR4 RDIMM featuring both Micron logo (far left) and Crucial logo (centre right)Crucial-branded 525GB solid state driveLexar SDXC UHS-II memory card (front and back) manufactured while the company was owned by MicronCrucial-branded SD memory cards from 2007
Micron was founded in Boise, Idaho, in 1978[6] by Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis Wilson, and Doug Pitman as a semiconductor design consulting company.[7] Startup funding was provided by local Idaho businessmen Tom Nicholson, Allen Noble, Rudolph Nelson, and Ron Yanke. Later it received funding from Idaho billionaire J. R. Simplot, whose fortune was made in the potato business. In 1981, the company moved from consulting to manufacturing with the completion of its first wafer fabrication unit ("Fab 1"), producing 64K DRAM chips.
Micron sought to enter the market for RISC processors in 1991 with a product known as FRISC, targeting embedded control and signal processing applications. Running at 80 MHz and described as "a 64-bit processor with fast context-switching time and high floating-point performance", the design supported various features for timely interrupt handling and featured an arithmetic unit capable of handling both integer and floating-point calculations with a claimed throughput of 80 MFLOPS for double-precision arithmetic. Micron aimed to provide a "board-level demonstration supercomputer" in configurations with 256 MB or 1 GB of RAM.[9] Having set up a subsidiary and with the product being designed into graphics cards and accelerators, Micron concluded in 1992 that the effort would not deliver the "best bang for the buck", reassigning engineers to other projects and discontinuing the endeavour.[10]
A 1996 3-way merger among ZEOS International, Micron Computer, and Micron Custom Manufacturing Services (MCMS) increased the size and scope of the company;[6] this was followed rapidly with the 1997 acquisition of NetFrame Systems, in a bid to enter the mid-range server industry.[11]
In 2002 Micron put its personal computer business up for sale. The company found the business difficult as the number 12 American computer maker with only 1.3 percent of the market.[14]
Micron and Intel created a joint venture in 2005, based in IM Flash Technologies in Lehi, Utah.[15] The two companies formed another joint venture in 2011, IM Flash Singapore, in Singapore.[16] In 2012 Micron became sole owner of this second joint venture.[17] In 2006 Micron acquired Lexar, an American manufacturer of digital media products.[3]
In 2008 Micron spun off Aptina Imaging, which was acquired by ON Semiconductor in 2014. Micron retained a stake in the spinoff.[20] However, the core company suffered setbacks and had to layoff 15 percent of its workforce in October 2008,[21][22] during which period the company also announced the purchase of Qimonda's 35.6 percent stake in Inotera Memories for $400 million.[23] The trend of layoffs and acquisitions continued in 2009 with the termination of an additional 2,000 employees,[24][25] and the acquisition of the FLCOS microdisplay company Displaytech.[26] Micron agreed to buy flash-chip maker Numonyx for $1.27 billion in stock in February 2010.[27]
On 3 February 2012 CEO Appleton died in a plane crash shortly after takeoff from the Boise Airport. He was the pilot and sole occupant of the Lancair IV aircraft.[28][29][30] Mark Durcan replaced Appleton as the CEO shortly thereafter,[31] eliminating his former title of President.[32]
In 2013 the Avezzano chip fab was sold to LFoundry.[19] In the 2012 to 2014 period, Micron again went through an acquisition-layoff cycle, becoming the majority shareholder of Inotera Memories, purchasing Elpida Memory[33] for $2 billion and the remaining shares in Rexchip, a PC memory chip manufacturing venture between Powerchip and Elpida Memory for $334 million,[34][35] while announcing plans to lay off approximately 3,000 workers.[36][37] Through the Elpida acquisition, Micron became a major supplier to Apple Inc. for the iPhone and iPad.[33] In December 2016 Micron finished acquiring the remaining 67 percent of Inotera, making it a 100 percent subsidiary of Micron.[38]
In April 2017 Micron announced Sanjay Mehrotra as the new president and CEO to replace Mark Durcan.[39][40] In June 2017 Micron announced it was discontinuing the Lexar retail removable media storage business and putting some or all it up for sale.[41] In August of that year the Lexar brand was acquired by Longsys, a flash memory company based in Shenzhen, China.[4]
In May 2018 Micron Technology and Intel launched QLC NAND memory to increase storage density.[42] The company ranked 150th on the Fortune 500 list of largest United States corporations by revenue.[43]
In February 2019 the first microSD card with a storage capacity of 1 terabyte (TB) was announced by Micron.[44] As of March 2020 3.84TB Micron 5210 Ion is the cheapest large-capacity SSD in the world.[45] In September 2020 the company introduced the world's fastest discrete graphics memory solution. Working with computing technology leader Nvidia, Micron debuted GDDR6X in the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 and GeForce RTX 3080 graphics processing units (GPUs).[46] In November 2020, the company unveiled a new 176-layer 3D NAND module. It offers improved read and write latency and is slated to be used in the production of a new generation of solid-state drives.[47]
On 22 October 2021, Micron closed the sale of IM Flash's Lehi, Utah fab to Texas Instruments for a sale price of US$900 million.[48] With the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, Micron announced its pledge to invest billions in new manufacturing within the US.[49] In September 2022, Micron announced they would invest $15 billion in a new facility in Boise, Idaho.[50] In October 2022 Micron announced a $100 billion expansion in Clay, New York.[51][52]
Micron Technology owed Netlist $445 million in damages for infringing Netlist's patents related to memory-module technology for high-performance computing. The jury found that Micron's semiconductor-memory products violated two of Netlist's patents willfully, potentially allowing the judge to triple the damages. Netlist had sued Micron in 2022, accusing three of its memory-module lines of patent infringement, which Micron denied, also arguing the patents' invalidity. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office invalidated one patent in April 2024.[53]
Lawsuits
Fujian Jinhua
On 5 December 2017 Micron sued rivals United Microelectronics Corporation and Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. (JHICC) in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging infringement on its DRAM patents and intellectual property rights.[54] The U.S. Justice Department in 2018 announced an indictment against Fujian Jinhua, and authorities added the Chinese firm to the Entity List the same year. Fujian Jinhua vehemently denied the claims, saying it had not stolen any technology, and that "Micron regards the development of Fujian Jinhua as a threat and adopts various means to hamper and destroy the development of Fujian Jinhua,"[55]
On February 27, 2024, Judge Maxine Chesney of the U.S. Federal District Court in San Francisco acquitted Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit, whom Micron had sued for IP theft, of the charge in a non-jury verdict, believing that there was insufficient evidence to support the charge.[59][60]
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