The founding of semiconductors provided opportunities to many creative minds, and as a result, we have some big names in the industry who are the major contributors to the growth of the IT industry. Infineon Technologies AG is one of the largest semiconductor producers and suppliers in the world and is known to serve three main divisions: Automotive, Industrial Electronics, and Chip Card and Security Applications. The company has a history as old as the birth of the telegraph, but it officially started its operations as an independent company on 1 April 1999.
History and Formation of Infineon
Infineon Technologies AG is the result of the spin-off of its parent company Siemens Semiconductor. Werner von Siemens and Johann Georg Halske founded Semiconductor as Siemens & Halske on 1 October 1847 in Germany, and the company was a mere workshop in the beginning. Siemens & Halske was a telegraph manufacturing company and built the first long-distance telegraph line in Europe in 1848. By 1850, the company also started to provide its services in Russia, and in 1867, Siemens built the monumental Indo-European telegraph line stretching from London to Calcutta, over 11,000 km. Siemens is also credited for 1881’s first electric street lighting in the town of Godalming using AC Alternator driven by a watermill.
The company was experimenting in almost every field, from the light bulb to electric train, and at the same time, it was expanding overseas. During the beginning of 1900, it had become the seventh-largest company in the German empire. In the 1920s, Siemens & Halske started to manufacture radios, television sets, and electron microscopes.
It was the 1950s when the arrival of computers and the discovery of semiconductors encouraged Siemens & Halske to try their hands in the production of computers and semiconductor devices. Along with that, the company also invested in washing machines and pacemakers production. It also launched its first digital exchange in 1980.
In 1977, the company partnered with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to enter the American market and also established the Advanced Micro Computers (AMC), in Silicon Valley and in Germany to start the development of microcomputers. In the 90s, the company acquired several companies with different expertise and had a spun off in 1999, which resulted in the formation of Infineon Technologies, a legally independent company, dedicated to semiconductor manufacturing.
With the formation of Infineon Technologies AG, there was an erosion in the prices of DRAMs (Dynamic Random Access Memory), and now, the company was free to engage new customers other than Siemens. The very first year of its inception, the company produced and supplied the chips for chip cards. Though it was the first year of its operations, Infineon Technologies AG performed exceptionally well, with a recorded profit of US$70 million in its first fiscal year.
In the year 2000, Infineon started to focus on mobile communications, Internet access, electronic banking, electronic and mobile commerce along with innovative security and authentication systems. During the same time, it also introduced its first Bluetooth chipset.
Acquisitions
In 2007, Infineon partnered with Golden Gate Capital Wireline Communications for €250 million. This partnership led to the formation of Lantiq. The company sold its business segment of wireless solutions to Intel in 2011 for a sum of US$1.4 billion. In January 2011, it went on to acquire International Rectifier Corporation (IR) paying around $3 billion. Infineon bought the MEMS and LiDAR systems producers Innoluce in 2016. It also acquired Cypress Semiconductors in 2020.
The CEO
Reinhard Ploss is currently serving as the CEO of Infineon AG and was appointed to the post on 1 October 2012. He has done a doctorate in process engineering from the Technical University of Munich. He has been working with Siemens since 1986 and started as a process engineer for ion implantation at the company. In 1993, he was appointed to take over the technical management in the Villach (Austria) of the company. With the spun-off of Simens, he became the head of the Infineon Industrial Power division. At the same time, he also served as the managing director of the Infineon subsidiary. In 2007, he became a member of Infineon Management Board for Manufacturing, and finally, in 2012, he was promoted to the post of CEO of Infineon Technologies AG.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.