Semiconductor History | Am Campeon, Neubiberg — What Siemens Decided It Could Not Carry

Low brick and glass blocks along an artificial lake, with reeds in the foreground and a path around the water. It looks like a business park, which is roughly what a chip company becomes once it has been cut loose from its parent. On 1 April 1999 Siemens transferred its semiconductor subsidiaries into a new company called Infineon Technologies AG, with Ulrich Schumacher as chief executive and Volker Jung chairing the supervisory board. The unit being separated was not small. It had sales of about 3.8 billion dollars in the 1998 financial year and more than twenty-five thousand employees, and the company described the separation as the largest high-technology spin-off in European industry, which is its own claim rather than an independent finding. The reason was the cycle. A semiconductor business has to keep building fabs through downturns, and inside a conglomerate that means other divisions paying for years when chips lose money. Siemens decided a listed company funding itself on public markets was the better structure. The division had also become worth separating. It had gone from the nineteenth largest chipmaker in the world in 1993 to the tenth by the end of the decade. Infineon listed in March 2000 on the Frankfurt and New York exchanges, at close to the top of the technology bubble. By the end of 2001 Siemens had cut its holding to 41.3 percent. Then the same reasoning ran again, one level further down. In 2006 Infineon put its memory business into a separate company, Qimonda, which was insolvent by January 2009 and is the subject of this collection's Dresden entry. The parent kept what it could carry through a cycle: power semiconductors, automotive microcontrollers, security chips for cards and passports. Two European conglomerates reached the same conclusion within seven years of each other. Siemens let go of semiconductors in 1999, and Philips separated its own division as NXP in 2006. Neither company decided chips were unimportant. Both decided they could not be owned alongside anything else. Infineon has been at this address since the end of 2005, on a purpose-built campus whose name is a compression of campus and Infineon. Part of it now holds offices belonging to a mobile communications business that was an Infineon department until it was sold to Intel. The buildings are private, but the lake, the path and the reeds in the photograph are the edge that faces outward, which is more than most sites in this collection offer. Photo: Mucber, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Campeon, Neubiberg, May 2020).