Another one bites the dust

Sad. They failed to mention, where this East Kilbride is located.

Rene

Rene Tschaggelar wrote:

Motorola established the MOS1 fab (4") in East Kilbride nearly 40 years ago in 1969, later followed by MOS1A (6"). The latter was subsequently incorporated into the new MOS9 fab when MOS1 closed down. They also dabbled with the ex AMD fab in South Queensferry which became MOS16 and in 2000 expressed an interest in the Scottish Executive funded but unused Hyundai fab near Dunfermline.

Since being taken over by venture capitalists and relaunched as Freescale it has been a downhill spiral for semiconductor manufacturing in Scotland.

And the reason being ? Even if the machinery after a couple of years is not on the latest level of technology anymore, there is still plenty of semiconductors to be manufactured.

IMO, even older machines can be productively used. For some reason, this appears not to be possible. Or are these cheap tricks to convice the local government to throw out a few billions in subsidies ?

Rene

. . .

That's about the strength of it. The Scottish Executive were conned into giving nearly 2M UKP to Motorola, as was, just a few years ago and late last year promised another 3M UKP to keep production in Scotland. Luckily none of the last tranche of taxpayers money has yet been given to the venture capitalists and it looks as though the Executive may even try to reclaim some of the first round too.

Is it just Scotland?.

I'm doing work for a turbine blade company. A vast site with machines the size of office blocks and once employing many thousands. Now run by 'managers' and is so so sad to see this example of the loss and attrition being suffered by UK heavy industry. Who cares about new/old industries though, when there's so much cash to be trousered by the city gent's, in financial 'products' and offshore dealings.