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In the very near future, system products which aren't designed to maximize energy efficiency will not only face a declining consumer base but could well represent a long-term threat to the health of the planet.
Dear Shareholders,
If you got this far, you're probably asking yourselves, what is "National 3.0?" Before we go on, let's take a brief walk in history:
"Animals of Silicon Valley"
In the early days of National Semiconductor's existence, we prided ourselves on our manufacturing prowess (we still do), and we believed we could steal market share from anyone based on this prowess. Once dubbed "the animals of Silicon Valley," given our young, brash, somewhat-cowboy culture, we embraced and represented the moniker. Though we were always technology driven, we often led with our cost advantage.
This mentality even affected the Information Appliance Era in the late-90s with our quest to enable the sub-$1,000 PC. From the beginning, the focus for National, as it was for most all of the early capital-intensive semiconductor companies, was to "fill the fab" (fabrication plant)!
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Semiconductor demand in the first few decades of our industry was driven by three megatrends:
- The computer (mainframes to minis to PCs)
- The connected computer (Internet PC networks)
- And, later, the cell phone
These relatively few volume drivers had an increasing number of semiconductor suppliers chasing a limited number of volume sockets such as DRAMs (Dynamic Random Access Memory), CPUs (microprocessors) and PC chipsets (companion chips)... and more recently chasing a small number of commonly used volume circuits found in cell phones. The competition for sockets is particularly rampant in digital circuits where original designs and "second sources" (copies) of competitors' chips are facilitated by an arsenal of off-the-shelf, digital-design tools allowing competitors to easily chase a high-volume socket.
This, accompanied by the exponentially rising costs of stateof-the-art digital fabs, caused a trifurcation of our industry into 1) a very small number of digital chip companies that could keep up with those huge costs, 2) companies that chose to become fabless, or "fab-lite" or those "flopping around undecided with an uncertain future," and 3) companies that don't need state-of-the-art fabrication plants but can still produce leadingedge products in their domain (pure-play analog companies).
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