IBM Microelectronics took root from the opening of two separate facilities for
microelectronics: a
Essex Junction, Vermont, facility in 1957, and the
Hudson Valley Research Park facility in 1963. The Microelectronics Division was formally organized in 1966. By 2001, its operations also comprised offices in
North Carolina,
Minnesota,
Colorado. It also had a plant in
Quebec. The Essex Junction facility spanned and was the primary site of domestic semiconductor manufacture for IBM before 2002. In 1966, this factory produced the first mass manufactured
semiconductor DRAM, based on
Robert H. Dennard's patents developed for IBM in 1966. Such chips were later used in the company's
System/370 Model 145 mainframe (1970), IBM's first computer built entirely from integrated circuits, abandoning the
core memory of old. Employment in the Essex Junction facility peaked in the mid-1990s, with roughly 8,500 employees. Meanwhile, The Hudson Valley Research Park facility in
East Fishkill, New York, spanned and was the primary site of semiconductor wafer and packaging manufacture after 2002. the company let go of 1,500 people in their Microelectronics facility in Essex Junction and East Fishkill. This layoff primarily affected the former, which had employed 7,000. Executives at IBM called the layoffs part of a restructuring of the Microelectronics Division, whose business was to move toward operating as a
chip foundry on a
contract basis, instead of mass manufacturing its own wares to sell onto the semiconductor market. Another layoff the Vermont factory in 2003 reduced the headcount by 500, with 6,000 employees remaining. ==2015 sale to GlobalFoundries==