Demonstrating that a chip company the size of GEC Plessey Semiconductors Ltd is a perfectly viable entity provided it builds a fairly high volume product line to keep the cash flowing, Cypress Semiconductor Corp reached $304.5m last year against $450m or so for the UK firm, and is confidently pitching for $1,000m a year well before the end of the decade: the company has got there not without its set-backs – its Ross Technology subsidiary couldn’t win enough customers for its Sparc chip and it had to sell the business to Fujitsu Ltd, but last quarter, sales jumped 34% to $100.2m as the company capitalises on demand for fast static memory chips for use as cache memory for Pentium personal computers; statics account for 50% of sales; the rest is made up of networking chips, timing chips, personal computer building block chip sets; fast logic chips and programmable gate arrays; it is now expanding its Bloomington, Minnesota and Austin, Texas plants to increase capacity to $740m of chips annually.
