to co-found chip maker VLSI Technology. Schreiner left shortly thereafter. Honeywell put in a new manager who was being fast-tracked through the company. His previous job was running a factory in Mexico that made valves for hot water heaters. The fab in Santa Cruz never became operational because the people who would be able to start it up refused to move out of the valley as they believed the company would disappear and they would be stranded. The fab was eventually purchased by Western Digital, a Los Angeles area company who had no ties to the valley. During this time, Steve Jobs approached Synertek looking for a new 16-bit version of the 6502 processor for upcoming projects. Schreiner declined, feeling the company could not afford to develop it, but offered to do so if Apple would fund the project. Jobs declined, and noted that this would force Apple to move to the Motorola 68000. When this finally came to pass, and Atari followed them the next year, Synertek's sales imploded. By this time the custom side of the company was long gone, the Honeywell mainframe still lacked design software, and they had no other modern processor design license. The only design added through this era was the low-end Zilog Z8 microcontroller, which Honeywell needed for a new line of programmable thermostats, replacing the original clockwork Chronotherm of the 1940s. By 1985 the company was a shell, with all the talent having left the company, no new designs, and no design capability. Honeywell shut down operations at Synertek that year. Facilities Synertek's semiconductor fabrication plant in Santa Clara, California operated from 1974 to 1985. The site, at 3050 Coronado Drive, was later found to be contaminated with organic solvents (including trichloroethane, trichloroethylene, and vinyl chloride) and required Superfund cleanup to ameliorate hazardous releases into the aquifer. In around 1983, construction began for an additional manufacturing facility in Santa Cruz, California. When market conditions deteriorated, primarily because of business downturns at Atari, work was stopped at the Santa Cruz facility and it was sold. References Citations Bibliography External links Synertek at chipdb.org Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States Defunct companies based in California Electronics companies established in 1973 Companies disestablished in 1985 1985 disestablishments in California Electronics companies of the United States Superfund sites in California