Micron In The News -- May 21, 2023

Locator: 44708CHIPS.

Micron was in the news today. Some spat with China.

China's cyberspace regulator said on Sunday that products made by U.S. memory chip manufacturer Micron Technology had failed its network security review and that it would bar operators of key infrastructure from procuring from the firm.

The decision, announced amid a dispute over chip technology between Washington and Beijing, could include sectors ranging from transport to finance, according to China's broad definition of critical information infrastructure.

I don't follow Micron; I don't invest in Micron.

I mention Micron once in awhile on the blog. 

This was the most significant post on Micron on the blog; from January 20, 2023.

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The Chip War

Chip War: The Fight For the World's Most Critical Technology, Chris Miller, c. 2022.

Chapter 21: The Potato Chip King -- The story of Micron

The chapter begins:

Micron made "the beset damn widgets in the whole world," Jack Simplot used to say.

The Idaho billionaire didn't know much about the physics of how his company's main product, DRAM chips, actually worked. 

The industry was full of PhDs, but Simplot hadn't finished eighth grade.

His expertise was potatoes, as everyone knew from the white Lincoln Town Car he drove around Boise [Idaho].

"Mr Spud, the license plate declared

Yet Simplot understood business in a way Silicon Valley's smartest scientists didn't. As America's chip industry struggled to adjust to Japan's challenge, cowboy entrepreneurs like him played a fundamental role in reversing what Bob Noyce had called a "death spiral and executing a surprise turnaround.

Later:

Micron, the DRAM firm that Simplot backed, at first seemed guaranteed to fail. When twin brothers Joe and Ward Parkinson founded Micron in the basement of a Boise dentist office in 1978, it was the worst possible time to start a memory chip company.

Japanese firms were ramping up production of high-quality, low-priced memory chips. Micron's first contract was to design a 64K DRAM chip for a Texas company called Mostek, but like every other American DRAM producer, it was beaten to the market by Fujitsu.

Soon Mostek -- the only customer for Micron's chip design services -- went bust. Amid an onslaught of Japanese competition, AMD, National Semiconductor, Intel, and other industry leaders abandoned DRAM production, too.

Facing billion-dollar losses and bankruptcies, it seemed like all Silicon Valley might go bankrupt. America's smartest engineers would be left flipping burgers [and asking "french fries with that?"]. At least, the country still had plenty of french fries.

... [At this time, Micron founders] first met Simplot at the Royal Café in downtown Boise .... a potato farmer like him saw clearly that Japanese competition had turned DRAM chips into a commodity market. He'd been through enough harvests to know that the best time to buy a commodity business was when prices were depressed and everyone else was in liquidation.

Simplot decided to back Micron with $1 million. He's later poured in millions more.

Many, many lessons there. One wonders if Simplot was worried about quarterly returns; one wonders what his time horizon? One wonders if Harvard Business School uses the Simplot-Micron story as a case study?

Later, we'll look more closely how this relates to China's chip problem right now, but first we have to look at how Russia failed. But that, too, is later. And I think Japan is taking note, also.

By the way, Trump made it possible for Biden to get credit for passing the "Chips" bill, one of three huge bills Biden passed in 2022. 

See this post. January 19, 2023: is anyone paying attention?