STMicroelectronics: The Turnaround That Created a European Semiconductor Giant

Links:

[gdavids]

Absent from this history is Thomson's Mostek acquisition in Nov 1985. While Mostek's DRAM business was flaming out, its SRAM and speciality products added a nice revenue stream to Thomson. Even more valuable was Mostek's patent portfolio. Upon the Thomson/SGS merger, SGS immediately shut down the DRAM business. Over the next couple of years SGS Thomson netted over $450M in license revenue from the Mostek patents. An important patent area was Mostek's pioneering work on ion implantation which SGS Thomson leveraged not only for the license revenue but also for its own internal use. I know this story well as I was an application engineer for Mostek from 1980 to Oct 1985 when UTC laid off most of us in preparation for the sale to Thomson.

[careycummings]

Holy Moly. I will never get over how it is these companies can lose much money, and eventually eek out a small profit, then become huge. It boggles the mind. These histories are just fascinating.

[JohnVance]

Still constantly impressed at the speed with which you manage to put out these high-quality, well-researched mini-docs.

[CB-]

Dude Asianometry's work ethic and his quality of content is off the charts...the stuff he makes is timeless

[kilerik]

ST design office in Istanbul was one of the few (and best) places to work if you graduated in microelectronics related areas in early 2000s Turkey. Many of my friends had their first work experiences there.

ST moved that office under ST-Ericsson (a child company of both) which was doomed from from the start.

In mid-2010s they crashed and burned and later got sold to Ericsson.

[dairallan]

The best translation for "Societe Generale" from Italian to English (and the same with Societe Anonyme from French and Spanish) is "company". So they literally called it "Semiconductor Company".

[sylvansky]

Oh man, I would never have thought my home town would get a mention on THIS channel !!! 9:02 GREAT PRONUNCIATION TOO.
I cycled past this factory my entire childhood, great to finally know what was happening in there!

[priyanks]

Pasquale has often been quoted as some sort of legend by the oldheads at ST. I had no idea why.
Now I do. Thank you
-an Indian ST employee

[amptechron]

Your videos are always like attending the classes of a favorite teacher. Thanks!

[Canada]

Just a little correction, in this context, "società" translates to "company", not "society". Good video.

[Thechannelofnick]

ST Crolles is a real treat, every day I would watch paragliders sailing down from the mountain behind the fab. I'd also really appreciate if more cafeterias started offering little charcuterie plates

[knietiefimdispo]

What a hell of work you must have put into this historical research. Not forgetting the 'Ndrangheta and Mafia threat to every public figures in Italy in the 80's.

[UnexpectedMaker]

That was a really great history lesson - Thanks for presenting it so clearly. Love your work!

[pizzablender]

The Starlink base station seems to be a full STM design, from the teardown that I saw. Interesting company.

[TheEvertw]

Thanks for documenting this story!
I love ST, their MCU's are my favorite ARM processors. Great support from the demo software suite to the Nucleo devboards.

[FernandoJRodriguezFernandoJRM]

Thanks for reminding everyone about this video in your 2024 look back video, I missed it when it was published and it was indeed interesting (as is the norm for your channel).

[Valeryp]

I've vistited ST fab in Catania back in 2018, and it felt like another world compared to everything else around it.
Now I know where this diamond comes from, and I'm even prouder as a Sicilian to know Pistorio's story

[samw]

This is a great channel. Asianometry drives the point home in these vids, that the development of technology is always contingent on the people and circumstances that give rise to it.

[wskinnyodden]

Worked with many a Olivetti 386 and 486 back in the day, specifically while migrating older business computing solutions from a DR-Multiuser DOS based serial console solution to a Novell Netware 3.12 File Server based solution, and this was in fact the first network I fully deployed and configured on my own, from server to the clients. (Invoicing and Stocks being the main use of these systems) The network was running atop IPX/SPX at the time, TCP/IP was implemented after the whole system was upgraded, starting with the server wich was replaced with a Pentium 2 450 running Windows NT4 Server and the clients upgraded to Windows 95 (lots of money spent on the clients due to the 95 requirements, something that was not needed when moving to Novell Netware)

[nickmoore]

Interesting. I have a SGS-made Z80 CPU in my ZX Spectrum computer, so I recently looked the company up online. Thanks for providing much more depth to their history.