What’s in store for Micron’s next 40 years?

Micron Technology, the grande dame of Idaho’s technology industry, is celebrating the 40^th anniversary of its founding this week, and, by all accounts, appears to be ready to stay in Idaho for at least another 40 years.

The Boise-based company is known for designing and producing chips that go into computers, solid state disk drives, cell phones, and now even automobiles. It is best known now for making dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips, a more profitable product typically used in computers, rather than competing in the commodity market for memory chips. It is the world’s fourth-largest semiconductor company, holding 40,000 patents and employing 34,000 people across 17 countries.

“Micron is the last remaining U.S.-based DRAM maker,” said Jim Handy, general director of Objective Analysis, in Los Gatos, California. “In the middle 1970s, when DRAM was new, all DRAM makers were U.S.-based.”

At one point, the world had 28 DRAM makers. Now there are just three: Micron, Samsung and Hynix.

Handy attributed part of Micron’s success to the fact that it kept acquiring companies as they exited the DRAM business.

“Someday there will only be one integrated DRAM manufacturer, and it’s hard to predict which of the last three it will be, but Micron certainly could be the one,” he said.

That said, the company has also branched out into other areas, such as making PCs itself – an effort it shut down a few years later.

“We didn’t want to be reliant on DRAM,” said Karen Metz, vice president of business planning and process management, who has worked in Micron’s Boise office for 26 years.

The company has since decided to stick to its knitting and move from diversification to adjacent and aligned technologies. “We needed to stay more at our core,” Metz said.

Technology Tentpole

Locally, Micron was one of the primary cornerstones in the development of the Treasure Valley’s technology industry, said Rick Ritter, lab director for Meridian incubator New Ventures Lab and former president and CEO of Idaho TechConnect.

“Up until a few years ago, the research around economic development and ‘technology ecosystems’ was that hubs like Silicon Valley, Boston and Route 128 were only possible when you had a great university/universities in the region,” he said. “Research has now shown that an aggregation/cluster of larger tech companies can have the same effect as a university.”

“Micron has put us on the ‘tech city map,’” said Bill Connors, president of the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce. “In so many ways, Micron has created the innovative culture and attitude that Boise is now known by. Our state’s prosperity has been directly related to Micron’s prosperity. The sheer number of employees, many of whom are highly skilled engineers and innovators, have brought a special diverse workforce and talent pool to our region. It has become a global leader in an industry that touches most of humanity, and it all emanates from little Boise, Idaho.”

In particular, that has helped Idaho go beyond its original role in the extractive and agriculture industries, Connors said.

“In a state whose legacy industries in agriculture, mining, food processing and forest products are known around the world, Micron has made technology our newest global legacy industry, and that economic diversity has brought every Idahoan a greater opportunity and a better life,” he said.

The company has been influential not just in and of itself, but for the technology startups it and its former employees have spawned, Ritter said.

“We are now in generation four or five of that evolution,” he said, recalling a 2008 map, TechBoise Universe, that showed all the companies that Micron alumni had generated at that point. “If you connect the dots — new buildings for research, more research talent, joint ventures with other companies — it is pretty clear that Micron maintains its current leadership role in contributions to the tech ecosystem. That means an increased need for brains from a variety of scientific and technical fields.”

According to a December 2017 report from the Boise State University College of Business and Economics, Micron employs 6,300 workers in the state with an annual payroll of more than $777 million. In addition, Micron generates significant
business for the suppliers of goods and services needed to support its operations, creating more than 9,000 additional jobs with an annual increase of another nearly $400 million in labor income. In Boise, that amounts to almost 5 percent of the local jobs, with an impact on income of nearly $1.17 billion annually.

Micron’s Future

Boise is now primarily a research and development facility as opposed to a production facility, Metz said.

“Our primary focus is high-tech process and product development,” as well as serving as the corporate office, she said. “All along, we’ve had R&D here. Instead of having it dispersed, we’ve continued to invest. It wasn’t a decision to put it here, but to continue to grow it here.”

That mirrors the technology industry in the U.S. and Silicon Valley as a whole, Handy said.

“There are very few fabs in Silicon Valley anymore, and the ones that remain are tiny,” he said. “The result of this has been a diversification of the Valley’s businesses to a broader range of industries, all of which require enormous talent: biotech, software, internet services. Idaho is likely to follow this path as well.”

In particular, Micron is looking at providing the storage and memory for the burgeoning artificial intelligence industry, Metz said.

“All those photos people are taking on their cameras and video all need to be stored somewhere,” she said. “Micron is sitting at the heart of that storage. The amount of data is overwhelming, and it’s a huge opportunity for us to evolve this business.”

During the company’s most recent investor day in San Francisco, it was flanked by Microsoft and Amazon, two companies that are working to leverage all that date, Metz noted. In addition, Micron announced a $1 million foundation fund for artificial intelligence startups.

Corporate Philanthropy

The company is known for its philanthropy, with buildings all over Boise stamped with Micron’s name.

“It has been an incredible corporate citizen and helped make Boise the cool, hip, entrepreneurial, artsy, prosperous community that we are through its generous foundation and corporate giving,” Connors said. “I challenge you to find an important institution in Boise that Micron has not been an important supporter of. From Boise State University to the Boise Chamber, the Micron name and logo are a symbol of community support for education, entrepreneurship, the arts, research, sports, community events and everything that makes Boise, Boise.”

In particular, Micron has contributed millions of dollars for buildings and programs at Boise State University. Others include science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education through the Micron Foundation, libraries, the College of Western Idaho and the Trailhead startup community. The total amount is on the order of $88 million, according to the company.

Cyclical Industry

That’s not to say the company hasn’t weathered a few bumps. In a cyclical, commodity industry, its fortunes have tended to go up and down with the market, such as a string of quarterly losses during and after the 2007 recession. It has also had its share of layoffs as the industry has gone up and down, as well as intellectual property lawsuits in the highly competitive chip industry.

Micron’s biggest blow was likely on Feb. 3, 2012, when its CEO, Steve Appleton, died in a plane crash at age 51. Then-president Mark Durcan, who had announced his retirement just the week before, came back and served as CEO until his retirement in 2017, when he was replaced by Sanjay Mehrotra, formerly founder at SanDisk.

Mehrotra’s hiring was a shot in the arm for the company and for Idaho’s tech community in general, Ritter said.

“The new CEO is bringing a lot of folks from his old company as well as others, all of them research or innovator types. That means new products and services,” he said. “The last patent report I looked at showed Micron creeping up on Idaho National Laboratory in terms of patent applications and patents granted. I would expect that to continue, and I would expect that the people associated with some of those patents will leave Micron and add to the next generation of Micron-related companies.”

“Sanjay is the first Micron CEO who was not groomed by the organization,” Handy said. “It will be interesting to see what he does with the firm.”