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Which computer companies fabbed their own Silicon?

T

tsm75

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"Real computer companies have fabs"--to paraphrase Jerry Sanders, founder of AMD


DEC fabbed Alpha CPUs in their fab in Hudson Massachusetts, and I believe also VAX chips? They also designed chipsets, which I assume they also fabbed. Not sure about PDP-11 or before. Not sure when they opened the fab, or their semiconductor operations before that fab. It was called Fab 6, so were there 5 fabs before it? I would be highly interested in a list of chips which DEC fabbed, if anyone has such a list--and just in general history of DEC's semiconductor operations.

IBM: I assume they have lots but not sure about specifics. RISC Workstations (RS/6000), or Mainframe, maybe even PC? Didn't IBM manufacture x86 CPUs at one point?

How about any of the Seven Dwarfs: Burroughs, Sperry Rand (formerly Remington Rand), Control Data, Honeywell, General Electric, RCA and NCR. It seemed like there was a fab on every street corner, in those days.

Data General supposedly owned a fab on Mathilda Ave in Sunnyvale California but not sure what exactly they made and which computer lines it fit into. Anyone know details?

HP: the PA-RISC was designed by HP, not sure if they ever manufactured it. They also made chipsets. I'm very unfamiliar with HP's computer lineup before PA-RISC, not sure if they made minis or mainframes or what, and if any may have contained their own silicon.

I believe Sun (SPARC) and SGI (MIPS) never owned fabs but they did do their own chip designs, fabbed by 3rd party foundries.

Not sure about the Japanese & Korean conglomerates like NEC, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Samsung. Even Sony. Pretty sure Samsung fabs silicon which goes into their own smartphones (which is remarkable and technically puts them in this elite class which includes DEC, IBM, maybe Data General...and very few others)

Apple had done lots and lots of custom chip design at least as far back as the original Mac, but I'm pretty sure never owned a fab.

Texas Instruments definitely has owned fabs and has also made computers, not sure if any of their chips made into their own computers?

Not sure about Commodore/Amiga (pretty sure they at least had some custom designed chips), Atari etc.. Once you get to the bottom of the list you can start to think about computer companies which not only never fabbed their own chips but did not even ever design their own chips. Dell for example. CPU/Semiconductor companies like Intel, AMD & Motorola have made computers--mostly white box. Computers overtly branded by the CPU manufacturer would be remarkable.
 
TI placed many chips into their own computers. The entire 9900 series was mostly used in TI machines with both minis and the TI-99/4(A) being the more prominent designs. TI also manufactured Cyrix 486s.

HP had the original chips for the 3000 line and the PA-RISC that replaced them and the Saturn chips used in portables and calculators.

IBM manufactured a lot of X86 chips with the Blue Lightning being the most famous.

Commodore (CSG/MOS) produced the 6502 variants but the plant was not upgraded to remain competitive.

DEC manufactured many CPU chips for PDP-11 and VAX in addition to the Alpha. Not all the CPUs though. The PDP-8s were shifted to Harris designs while the LSI-11 used Western Digital chips plus the brief flirtation with MIPS.
 
In the UK there was Inmos with the Transputer.

These were mainly cards - but Inmos did produce multiprocessor computing engines.

Dave
 
That I am told, Four-Phase for a period manufactured their own semiconductors in-house until around the late 70's and then switched to a third party.
 
I think you should probably specify if you meant fabbing CPU's or just supporting chipsets or analog devices. Lots of large corporations had subsidiaries that made chips for things like sound cards, modens, networking devices, stereo equipment, analog parts, etc at one point or another.
 
resman said:
Compaq? I don't remember Compaq having a fab. Any supporting information?
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I was thinking Compaq because they had some VGA chips. But it looks like Motorola manufactured them.

Toshiba and Micron may also be candidates. Early Toshiba laptops were full of custom Toshiba chips, and every Micron PC in the 90s had Micron DRAM.
 
NCR had their MicroElectronics Division. They made chips (CPU, memory, I/O controllers, etc.) for retail and financial terminals and the SCSI logic chips. There were 3 fabs, Miamisbugh, Oh, Fort Collins, CO and Colorado Springs as I recall.
 
I assume NEC had their own fabs; they second-sourced a lot Intel chips, (I still have some NEC 82xx parts floating in my parts box from defunct XT clones in the 1990s) and the common uPD765 floppy disc controller was one of theirs.
 
IBM also produced Cyrix 6x86s and chips for the Atari Jaguar.

NEC produced a lot chips. Memory, Z80s, 8086s, the various V-series CPUs including both CISC (V20, V60) and RISC (V810, V830), the old 7220 display chip, and later a PowerVR GPU...

Hitachi made Z80, 6809, and 68000-compatible chips, the HD63484 display controller, and AFAIK their own SuperH processors. Yamaha made audio chips and sometimes other things like SEGA video controllers. Sony and Toshiba made chipsets for MSX computers.
 
daver2 said:
Of course, Compaq bought out DEC, but DEC may have got out of the semiconductor production market by that time?
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DEC sold their fab to Intel along with most of the stuff they made in it (PCI bridge chips, ethernet controllers, ARM CPUs, etc) to Intel at the end of 1997 a few months before Compaq bought what remained of the company. I think all Compaq got was the Alpha and related bits.
 
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