Transformation powers semiconductor pioneer

摘要

Fairchild Semiconductor launched a new branding initiative in March that symbolizes a major transformation for the company founded in 1957. Over the past two years, said Steve Fu, Fairchild's vice president of strategy, "the company has been going through a holistic transformation" that, although initially visible only internally, "now is being exposed to the world as Fairchild 2.0." Fairchild's founders, Fu said, invented the thin-film-deposition planar process that enables the monolithic integrated circuit as we know it today. Since its founding, Fairchild has been acquired by Schlumberger, sold to National Semiconductor, and in 1998, spun off into a company offering commodity power discrete devices as well as other standard products such as logic. The company initiated a number of acquisitions. A key one, said Fu, was the acquisition of the power-semiconductor division of Samsung, which enabled Fairchild to offer high-voltage products from 1,500 V down to 100 V in addition to its wide range of other products.