BUILDING ON THE PAST, READY FOR THE FUTURE: - MEMC

72
Lifestyles have changed dramatically in the fifty
years since the first shovelful of dirt was moved to
make way for the St. Peters plant. The average home
has laborsaving devices that would have been the
envy of previous generations. Flat screen televisions
with the ability to receive over 150 channels have
replaced the radios of the
1940s and bulky television
sets of the 1970s. Bills are paid
and shopping and homework
are done on laptop computers
with high-speed Internet
access. Teenagers, once
relegated to their bedrooms
to play vinyl LPs on record
players, now download their
favorite music to their highly
portable MP3 players. Today’s
grandparents communicate
with grandchildren via e-mail and receive photos
of their latest soccer games on their cell phones.
And, today’s automobiles may have as many as fifty
microprocessors or minicontrollers. All of this was
C H A P T E R S E V E N
Equations for Success
DiD yoU knoW?
By the end of the
twentieth century,
more than 250 million
people were living in the
United States and owned
approximately 1.6 billion
electronic devices.
achieved by the invention and continued innovation
of the integrated circuit, built on silicon substrate,
and continuously enabled by MEMC.
Fifty years into the Information Age, technology
is irreversibly embedded in cultures around the
world. What has sustained
MEMC through the past fifty
years will, without question,
position it for the future: its
technological innovation, its
focus on the customer, and
the people who make both
possible.
teChnologICal
exCellenCe
One of the secrets of MEMC’s
success undoubtedly rests in the tremendous
depth of the company’s research and development
knowledge. The R&D work that MEMC
accomplishes each and every year leads to constant