A UM-StL page on access to
the Silicon River in Missouri

Much of the silicon for our digital age
has been grown with techniques refined near
the junction of the two largest rivers in the U.S.
These waters contact past and future
silicon flow at many other places too,
making Missouri a nice place to hop in.

[What's New] [Boat & Bait Shop] [Head Waters] [Rapids] [Delta & Mouth] [The Forest]

River Map

Overview

The first, and largest US-based, manufacturer of silicon for giga-scale integrated circuits had its humble beginnings in 1959 in a field near the intersection of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, in St. Peters Missouri. This manufacturer began as a small part of Monsanto, which itself had begun decades earlier by manufacturing aspirin on the edge of the Mississippi. Although Monsanto sold the silicon company (called MEMC Electronic Materials) to the German Company Huls in the mid-1980's, MEMC (now owned and managed by U.S. based Texas Pacific Group) has continued to invest in our region by siting both their new world-headquarters, and their large-diameter wafer research and development efforts, in the Missouri soil from which it began.

While this source of some of the purest and most finely structured material in the world has been undergoing formation, refinement, and development here in Missouri, the applications which employ silicon, the techniques for fashioning it into useful form, and the tools for looking more deeply into its structure and behavior, have been growing by leaps and bounds! Some of the organizations which put semi-conducting silicon to use, either into products or in practice, have also made major contributions in Missouri. These include Emerson Electric, McDonnell Douglas, Missouri University, Southwestern Bell Telephone, Tripos, the University of Missouri at Rolla, and Washington University, for example.

The latter two institutions, Missouri University, the University of Missouri-KC, and Parks College of St. Louis University, also teach techniques of circuit design and fabrication put to use by organizations involved in the building of devices on silicon wafers (such as Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Micron Technology, Midwest Microelectronics in Kansas City, Motorola, and Texas Instruments). Lastly, researchers involved in the managing of defects in VLSI silicon on the microscopic scale have pooled resources between institutions (like MEMC, Washington University, Monsanto, and UM-StL) to solve a wide variety of information-technology, and other materials, problems while at the same time equipping students to be resourceful employees in the electronics industry. The private-sector/federally funded Center for Molecular Electronics Building at UM-StL is perhaps the most recent example in this context.

The Missouri-wide Silicon River Initiative (which inspired this page) is designed to show state support for the nurturing of this river by putting to work effective and efficient incentives, both for Missouri participants to collaborate and for outside organizations to join in. The logo below will link to further resources on that initiative itself.

KC-Columbia-StL Corridor Map

What's New?

On 28 May, 1997, in Columbia Missouri, short presentations were given on the Silicon River resource inventory by Stan Salva (Midwest Microelectronics), and on University capabilities by W. C. Nunnally (MU-Columbia), C. H. Wu (UM-Rolla), Barry Spielman (Washington U Engineering), Phil Fraundorf (UM-StL & Washington U Physics), and Roobik Gharagagi (Parks College-SLU). The attendees were also addressed by group organizer Marcia Mellitz (UM-StL Emerging Technologies), William Simon (SLU), and Dennis Roedemeier (Missouri Dept. of Economic Development).

We are currently collecting web links to silicon river participants. What follows is an outline of some possible river resource categories. Please send suggestions for both links, and category logic, to philf@newton.umsl.edu. One possible strategy for assigning a given resource to a given category is illustrated in the figure below:


A. Boat & Bait Shop

Suppliers

Locally-Based

Based Elsewhere in the U.S.

  • Czochralski Crucibles from General Electric Quartz
  • Crystal Pullers from Ferrofluidics

    Based Elsewhere on our Planet

    Trouble Shooters and Guides

    Locally-Based

    Based Elsewhere in the U.S.

  • American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM)
  • National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
  • Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI)
  • Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA)
  • SEmiconductor MAnufacturing TECHnology (SEMATECH)
  • Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)
  • SIlicon Wafer Engineering and Defect Science (SiWEDS)
  • Based Elsewhere on our Planet


    B. Head Waters

    Silane & Polysilicon

    Locally-Based

    Based Elsewhere in the U.S.

    Based Elsewhere on our Planet

    Silicon Wafers

    Locally-Based

  • MEMC Electronic Materials, Inc.

    Based Elsewhere in the U.S.

    Based Elsewhere on our Planet

  • Shin-Etsu Handotai Chemical Company.
  • Wacker-Siltronic Corporation.
  • Mitsubishi/Sumitomo Silicon (SUMCO).
  • Value-Added Wafers - e.g. with Epitaxial Silicon, Strained Silicon, Silicon On Insulator (SOI), specially-oriented surfaces, etc.

    Locally-Based

    Based Elsewhere in the U.S.

    Based Elsewhere on our Planet


    C. Rapids

    VLSI Fabrication Facilities

    Locally-Based

    Based Elsewhere in the U.S.

    Based Elsewhere on our Planet

    Circuit Design Facilities

    Locally-Based

    Based Elsewhere in the U.S.

    Based Elsewhere on our Planet


    D. Delta & Mouth

    Computers

    Locally-Based

    Based Elsewhere in the U.S.

    Based Elsewhere on our Planet

    Detectors

    Locally-Based

    Based Elsewhere in the U.S.

    Based Elsewhere on our Planet

    Displays

    Locally-Based

    Based Elsewhere in the U.S.

    Based Elsewhere on our Planet

    Telecommunications

    Locally-Based

    Based Elsewhere in the U.S.

    Based Elsewhere on our Planet


    E. The Forest

  • For more, see Missouri's Business & Technology Impact On-Line.
  • Here are lists of StL and KC companies on the web.
  • For VLSI sites elsewhere, see the MRC VLSI pages at U. Idaho.
  • Keith Dawson's Siliconia lists other information-technology regional-consortia.
  • The stuff here is Copyright (1970-97) by Phil Fraundorf
  • Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, UM-StL, St. Louis MO 63121-4499
  • Send comments/suggestions to philf@newton.umsl.edu
  • Other St. Louis links include Yahoo's, and the RCGA overview.
    AnySpeed Engineering Complex ColorMath Information Physics NanoWorld Explorations Reciprocal World Silicon River StarDust in the Lab Web Puzzlers
    Atomic Physics Lab Center for Molecular Electronics Center for NeuroDynamics Physics & Astronomy Scanned Tip and Electron Image Lab

  • At UM-StLouis see also: anyspeed, cme, i-fzx, progs, stei-lab, turnovers, & wuzzlers.
  • For this source, cite our URL at http://www.umsl.edu/~fraundor/si_river.html
  • Version release date: 14 Apr 2005.
  • Whole-site page requests est. around 2000/day hence more than 500,000/year.
  • Requests for a "stat-counter linked subset of pages" since 4/7/2005: .