Semiconductor ↔ relates to ↔ Automotive

came commonplace in other vehicle types, such as overhead line-powered mass transit vehicles, as well as special purpose vehicles such as mobility scooters. Since the late 20th century, technological advances in lithium batteries—which offer superior energy density and current output versus lead-acid batteries—has revived public interest as zero-emission vehicle options. Manufacturers mostly switched to hybrids that use internal combustion engines like conventional vehicles, but add electric motors as a supplement, powered by electricity produced internally by motor-generators and recovered from regenerative braking. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, which can be recharged from an electric grid and use electric motors as the primary propulsion rather than as a supplement to combustion engines, did not see any mass production until the late 2000s, and battery electric cars did not become practical options for the consumer market until the 2010s.

Cost of ownership Electric vehicles with low worldwide market share, such as ships, typically carry a higher initial purchase price than comparable ICE vehicles. This elevated upfront cost constitutes a significant barrier to entry. While long-term financial analyses may favor EVs, the immediate capital outlay often dictates purchasing decisions, slowing the pace of the overall market transition. The higher initial price is often offset by superior total cost of ownership (TCO) over the vehicle's lifespan. Operational expenses for EVs are markedly lower. Battery longevity and replacement Advances in lithium-ion batteries, driven at first by the personal-use electronics industry, allow full-sized, highway-capable EVs to travel nearly as far on a single charge as conventional cars go on a single tank of gasoline. Lithium batteries have been made safe, can be recharged in minutes instead of hours (see recharging time), and now last longer than the typical vehicle (see lifespan). The production cost of these lighter, higher-capacity lithium-ion batteries is gradually decreasing as the technology matures and production volumes increase. Research is also underway to improve battery reuse and recycling, which would further reduce the environmental impact of batteries. Many companies and researchers are also working on newer battery technologies, including solid state batteries and alternate technologies. The risk of requiring an out-of-warranty battery replacement represents the greatest source of long-term financial uncertainty for many prospective EV retail owners. Despite consumer anxieties, actual battery replacement events are statistically rare, and modern EV batteries are demonstrating significantly greater durability than initially anticipated. Studies have confirmed that EV batteries can outlast the vehicle's lifetime with minimal degradation. The financial risk associated with future replacement is collapsing due to advancements in battery manufacturing and economics.

ft have been propelled by electricity since the 1960s, non-rocket spacelaunch from Earth remains science fiction. Technological progresses in electric vehicle batteries, electric traction motors and automotive electronics (particularly electronic control units) has made electric cars more feasible and, in some cases, more cost-efficient than conventional ICE vehicles during the 21st century, with market penetration in some countries like China reaching nearly half of all new vehicles sold. As a means of reducing tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants, and to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels, government incentives are also available in many areas to promote the adoption of electric vehicles.

ern Oregon to Boise, and is the most populated area in Idaho. Historically, the valley had been known as the Lower Snake River Valley or the Boise River Valley. Pete Olesen, president of the valley's association of local Chambers of Commerce, coined the name "Treasure Valley" in 1959 to reflect the treasure chest of resources and opportunities that the region offered. The valley has a very diverse terrain, from sage flatlands, to mesas, agricultural areas, and urbanized areas.

The Treasure Valley is a valley in the western United States, primarily in southwestern Idaho, where the Payette, Boise, Weiser, Malheur, and Owyhee rivers drain into the Snake River. It includes all the lowland areas from Vale in rural eastern Oregon to Boise, and is the most populated area in Idaho. Historically, the valley had been known as the Lower Snake River Valley or the Boise River Valley. Pete Olesen, president of the valley's association of local Chambers of Commerce, coined the name "Treasure Valley" in 1959 to reflect the treasure chest of resources and opportunities that the region offered. The valley has a very diverse terrain, from sage flatlands, to mesas, agricultural areas, and urbanized areas.

eflect the treasure chest of resources and opportunities that the region offered. The valley has a very diverse terrain, from sage flatlands, to mesas, agricultural areas, and urbanized areas. As the Boise Metropolitan Area grows, more and more undeveloped and agricultural land is being urbanized. History Settling the region The tribes that roamed the area, specifically, were the Northern Paiute and Shoshone. In 1834, Thomas McKay built the original Fort Boise, in the area near present-day Parma, which was run for a time by Francois Payette. It later was moved because of flooding troubles and was abandoned in 1854. The Oregon Trail runs through the Treasure Valley. The valley was settled for the most part by ranchers and farmers, initially to supply the gold and silver mining communities in the higher elevations nearby: Idaho City in the Boise Basin and Silver City in the Owyhees. A new Fort Boise was constructed by the U.S. Army in 1863 in present-day Boise, from which the city grew.

Boise (locally also ) is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Idaho. It is the county seat of Ada County. The population of the city was 235,685 at the 2020 census. The Boise metropolitan area, located in the Treasure Valley, includes five counties of Idaho with an estimated population of 846,000, the most populous metropolitan area in Idaho and 95th-most populous in the United States. Located on the Boise River in southwestern Idaho, it is 41 miles (66 km) east of the Oregon border and 110 miles (177 km) north of the Nevada border. Downtown Boise's elevation is 2,704 feet (824 m) above sea level. Originally established as a military outpost in 1863 during the gold rush era, Boise rapidly grew due to its location on the Oregon Trail and its proximity to mining operations in the surrounding region. By the late 19th century, it had become a commercial and transportation hub, bolstered by the arrival of the railroad and irrigation projects that supported agriculture in the Treasure Valley. While agriculture and food processing remain important, Boise is home to major employers in the technology, manufacturing, and service sectors, including companies such as Micron Technology and Hewlett-Packard. Government, education, and healthcare also play significant roles in the local economy. The city is home to the Boise Art Museum, Idaho State Capitol, the annual Treefort Music Fest, and the Basque Block, showcasing its Basque heritage.

the Treasure Valley, includes five counties of Idaho with an estimated population of 846,000, the most populous metropolitan area in Idaho and 95th-most populous in the United States. Located on the Boise River in southwestern Idaho, it is 41 miles (66 km) east of the Oregon border and 110 miles (177 km) north of the Nevada border. Downtown Boise's elevation is 2,704 feet (824 m) above sea level. Originally established as a military outpost in 1863 during the gold rush era, Boise rapidly grew due to its location on the Oregon Trail and its proximity to mining operations in the surrounding region. By the late 19th century, it had become a commercial and transportation hub, bolstered by the arrival of the railroad and irrigation projects that supported agriculture in the Treasure Valley. While agriculture and food processing remain important, Boise is home to major employers in the technology, manufacturing, and service sectors, including companies such as Micron Technology and Hewlett-Packard. Government, education, and healthcare also play significant roles in the local economy. The city is home to the Boise Art Museum, Idaho State Capitol, the annual Treefort Music Fest, and the Basque Block, showcasing its Basque heritage.

der and 110 miles (177 km) north of the Nevada border. Downtown Boise's elevation is 2,704 feet (824 m) above sea level. Originally established as a military outpost in 1863 during the gold rush era, Boise rapidly grew due to its location on the Oregon Trail and its proximity to mining operations in the surrounding region. By the late 19th century, it had become a commercial and transportation hub, bolstered by the arrival of the railroad and irrigation projects that supported agriculture in the Treasure Valley. While agriculture and food processing remain important, Boise is home to major employers in the technology, manufacturing, and service sectors, including companies such as Micron Technology and Hewlett-Packard. Government, education, and healthcare also play significant roles in the local economy. The city is home to the Boise Art Museum, Idaho State Capitol, the annual Treefort Music Fest, and the Basque Block, showcasing its Basque heritage.

94,967, which by 2025 was estimated to have risen to 546,141. Ada County is by far the state's most populous county; it is home to 26.8% of the state's population. The county seat and largest city is Boise, which is also the state capital. Ada County is included in the Boise metropolitan area. The Ada County Highway District has jurisdiction over all the local county and city streets, except for private roads and state roads.

the Cascade Range, Ada County ranks second in population, behind Spokane County, Washington. History Ada County was created by the Idaho Territory legislature on December 22, 1864, partitioned from Boise County. It is named for Ada Riggs, the daughter of H. C. Riggs, a member of the legislature; he established the county and was a co-founder of Boise.

History Ada County was created by the Idaho Territory legislature on December 22, 1864, partitioned from Boise County. It is named for Ada Riggs, the daughter of H. C. Riggs, a member of the legislature; he established the county and was a co-founder of Boise. Canyon County, which originally included Payette County and most of Gem County, was partitioned from western Ada County in 1891. Geography According to the United States Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 1,060 square miles (2,700 km2), of which 1,053 square miles (2,730 km2) is land and 7.9 square miles (20 km2) (0.7%) is water. The Boise River flows through the northern portion of the county, and the northwest border is bounded by the foothills of the Boise Range mountains; the summits are in adjacent Boise County.

Micron Technology, Inc. is an American multinational semiconductor company that manufactures computer memory and computer data storage products, including dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), flash memory, High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), and solid-state drives (SSDs). Founded in 1978 in Boise, Idaho, Micron is the only major American computer memory manufacturer. It is one of the "Big Three" computer memory manufacturers, along with the South Korean companies Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Micron marketed its consumer products under the brand Crucial, with the sub-brand Ballistix being used to denote products targeting gaming computers, until its disestablishment on 2026. Micron and Intel together created IM Flash Technologies, which produced NAND flash memory. It owned Lexar between 2006 and 2017. Sanjay Mehrotra has served as president and CEO of Micron since 2017. On May 26, 2026, Micron became the latest U.S.

Since 2000 In 2000, Gurtej Singh Sandhu and Trung T. Doan at Micron initiated the development of atomic layer deposition high-k films for DRAM memory devices. This helped drive cost-effective implementation of semiconductor memory, starting with 90 nm node DRAM. Pitch double-patterning was also pioneered by Gurtej Singh Sandhu at Micron during the 2000s, leading to the development of 30-nm class NAND flash memory, and it has since been widely adopted by NAND flash and RAM manufacturers worldwide. In 2002, Micron spun off its personal computer business as MPC Corporation and put it up for sale. The company found the business difficult as the number 12 American computer maker with only 1.3 percent of the market. Micron and Intel created a joint venture in 2005, based in IM Flash Technologies in Lehi, Utah. The two companies formed another joint venture in 2011, IM Flash Singapore, in Singapore. In 2012 Micron became sole owner of this second joint venture. In 2006 Micron acquired Lexar, an American manufacturer of digital media products. The company changed leadership again in June 2007 with COO Mark Durcan becoming president. In 2008, Micron converted the Avezzano chip fab, formerly a Texas Instruments DRAM fab, into a production facility for CMOS image sensors sold by Aptina Imaging. In 2008, Micron spun off Aptina Imaging, which was acquired by ON Semiconductor in 2014. Micron retained a stake in the spinoff. However, the core company suffered setbacks and had to layoff 15 percent of its workforce in October 2008, during which period the company also announced the purchase of Qimonda's 35.6 percent stake in Inotera Memories for $400 million. The trend of layoffs and acquisitions continued in 2009 with the termination of an additional 2,000 employees, and the acquisition of the FLCOS microdisplay company Displaytech. Micron agreed to buy flash-chip maker Numonyx for $1.27 billion in stock in February 2010. On February 3, 2012, CEO Appleton died in a plane crash shortly after takeoff from the Boise Airport. He was the pilot and sole occupant of the Lancair IV aircraft. Mark Durcan replaced Appleton as the CEO shortly thereafter, eliminating his former title of president. In 2013, the Avezzano chip fab was sold to LFoundry. In the 2012 to 2014 period, Micron again went through an acquisition-layoff cycle, becoming the majority shareholder of Inotera Memories, purchasing Elpida Memory for $2 billion and the remaining shares in Rexchip, a PC memory chip manufacturing venture between Powerchip and Elpida Memory for $334 million, while announcing plans to lay off approximately 3,000 workers. Through the Elpida acquisition, Micron became a major supplier to Apple Inc. for the iPhone and iPad. In December 2016 Micron finished acquiring the remaining 67 percent of Inotera, making it a 100 percent subsidiary of Micron. In April 2017, Micron announced Sanjay Mehrotra as the new president and CEO to replace Mark Durcan. In June 2017 Micron announced it was discontinuing the Lexar retail removable media storage business and putting some or all of it up for sale. In August of that year the Lexar brand was acquired by Longsys, a flash memory company based in Shenzhen, China. In May 2018, Micron Technology and Intel launched QLC NAND memory to increase storage density. The company ranked 150th on the Fortune 500 list of largest United States corporations by revenue. In February 2019, the first microSD card with a storage capacity of 1 terabyte (TB) was announced by Micron. As of March 2020 3.84TB Micron 5210 Ion is the cheapest large-capacity SSD in the world. In September 2020 the company introduced the world's fastest discrete graphics memory solution. Working with computing technology leader Nvidia, Micron debuted GDDR6X in the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 and GeForce RTX 3080 graphics processing units (GPUs). In November 2020, the company unveiled a new 176-layer 3D NAND module. It offers improved read and write latency and is slated to be used in the production of a new generation of solid-state drives. On October 22, 2021, Micron closed the sale of IM Flash's Lehi, Utah fab to Texas Instruments for a sale price of US$900 million. In February 2022, Micron announced that it would discontinue its Ballistix gaming brand. With the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, Micron announced its pledge to invest billions in new manufacturing within the United States. In September 2022, Micron announced it would invest $15 billion in a new facility in Boise, Idaho. In October 2022, Micron announced a $100 billion expansion in Clay, New York. Micron Technology owed Netlist, Inc. $445 million in damages for infringing Netlist's patents related to memory-module technology for high-performance computing. The jury found that Micron's semiconductor-memory products violated two of Netlist's patents willfully, potentially allowing the judge to triple the damages. Netlist had sued Micron in 2022, accusing three of its memory-module lines of patent infringement, which Micron denied, also arguing the patents' invalidity. The U.S.

n since 2017. On May 26, 2026, Micron became the latest U.S. company to reach a US$1 trillion market capitalization, amid surging demand for its HBM chips. History 1978–1999 Micron was founded in Boise, Idaho, in 1978 by Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis Wilson, and Doug Pitman as a semiconductor design consulting company. Startup funding was provided by local Idaho businessmen Tom Nicholson, Allen Noble, Rudolph Nelson, and Ron Yanke. Later it received funding from Idaho billionaire J. R. Simplot, whose fortune was made in the potato business. In 1981, the company moved from consulting to manufacturing with the completion of its first wafer fabrication unit ("Fab 1"), producing 64K DRAM chips. In 1984, the company had its initial public offering. Micron sought to enter the market for RISC processors in 1991 with a product known as FRISC, targeting embedded control and signal processing applications. Running at 80 MHz and described as "a 64-bit processor with fast context-switching time and high floating-point performance", the design supported various features for timely interrupt handling and featured an arithmetic unit capable of handling both integer and floating-point calculations with a claimed throughput of 80 MFLOPS for double-precision arithmetic. Micron aimed to provide a "board-level demonstration supercomputer" in configurations with 256 MB or 1 GB of RAM. Having set up a subsidiary and with the product being designed into graphics cards and accelerators, Micron concluded in 1992 that the effort would not deliver the "best bang for the buck", reassigning engineers to other projects and discontinuing the endeavour. In 1994, founder Joe Parkinson retired as CEO and Steve Appleton took over as Chairman, President, and CEO. A 1996 3-way merger among ZEOS International, Micron Computer, and Micron Custom Manufacturing Services (MCMS) increased the size and scope of the company; this was followed rapidly with the 1997 acquisition of NetFrame Systems, in a bid to enter the mid-range server industry.

oducts, paper products, electronics manufacturing, silver and other mining, and tourism. The world's largest factory for barrel cheese, the raw product for processed cheese, is in Gooding, Idaho. The facility has an annual capacity of 120,000 metric tons and is owned by the Glanbia Group. History As Idaho neared statehood, mining and other extractive industries played a significant role in its economy. Although the state's reliance on mining has diminished over time, Idaho remains renowned as "The Gem State" due to its production of seventy-two varieties of precious and semi-precious stones. Idaho is a leading national producer of potatoes, trout, Austrian winter peas, and lentils.

Tourism is another way that Idaho capitalizes on its natural resources. The same tracts of wilderness that attracted Ernest Hemingway to the region in the early 1960s continue to attract outdoor enthusiasts with camping, hunting, fishing, whitewater kayaking, rafting, and skiing. The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is the largest Department of Energy facility in the country by area. The INL is an important part of the eastern Idaho economy. Outdoor recreation is a major industry in Idaho, encompassing activities from snowmobiling and downhill and cross-country skiing during the winter months to the development of Lewiston into a retirement destination. Lewiston's reputation as a retirement community is attributed to its mild winters, dry year-round climate, one of the lowest median wind velocities in the region, and access to rivers that offer a number of options for recreation. Other examples would be ATK Corporation, which operates three ammunition and ammunition components plants in Lewiston. Two produce sporting ammunition, while the third focuses on defense contracts. The Lewis-Clark valley has an additional independent ammunition components manufacturer and the Chipmunk rifle factory until it was purchased in 2007 by Keystone Sporting Arms and production was moved to Milton, Pennsylvania. Four of the world's six welded aluminum jet boat (for running river rapids) manufacturers are in the Lewiston-Clarkston, WA valley. Wine grapes were grown between Kendrick and Juliaetta in the Idaho Panhandle by the French Rothschilds until Prohibition. Between 1991 and 2002, Idaho expanded its commercial base to include the science and technology sector which accounted for over 25% of its Gross state product in 2001. Since the late 1970s, Boise emerged as a center for semiconductor manufacturing. Boise is the home of Micron Technology, the only U.S. manufacturer of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips.

The gross state product (state GDP) for the state of Idaho was $128.1 billion in 2024, and the state's per capita income that year was $61,836. Idaho has the 46th highest GDP per capita in the United States of America.Idaho is an important agricultural state, generating billions of dollars per year in commodities such as dairy products, cattle, and potatoes. It is the top potato-producing state in the United States, and almost one-third of the nation's potatoes are grown in the Snake River Plain, a belt of low-lying land that extends across southern Idaho. Three major varieties of wheat—dark northern spring, hard red, and soft white—are grown in the state. Important industries in Idaho are food processing, lumber and wood products, machinery, chemical products, paper products, electronics manufacturing, silver and other mining, and tourism. The world's largest factory for barrel cheese, the raw product for processed cheese, is in Gooding, Idaho.