Former SGS-Fairchild Semiconductor Facility in Falkirk

I took this photo in 2012, and was driving past last year, and noticed the buildings had been levelled and the site cleared. When I saw it in 2012, the former Fairchild semiconductor manufacturing buildings had been incorporated into a local college.

SGS-Fairchild was a JV by SGS of Italy and Fairchild Semiconductor. They had three manufacturing sites in Europe for micrologic DTL circuits, in Catania, Rennes and Falkirk.

The Falkirk, Scotland facility was established in 1968 and closed in 1981, a major downturn year in semiconductor history. By then it was manufacturing CMOS circuits, but a little too late.

In 1967 Marconi-Elliott had their equivalent DTL diffusion plant in Glenrothes and were establishing a MOS research lab, also in Glenrothes. General Instrument had established their MOS plant also in Glenrothes around the same time, similar timing to Hughes Aircraft's MOS process development in Glenrothes. National Semiconductor were planning their bipolar wafer fab in Greenock and Motorola were planning to take advantage of the local Scottish MOS experience to establish MOS 1, their first worldwide MOS wafer fab in East Kilbride.

Carlo Bozotti, the just retired CEO of ST Microelectronics was a former operations director of this SGS site.

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