olume, highly spe- cialized products with a very high profit margin. In much the same way, segments of the component industry have found their way offshore. Many domestic manufacturers are selling off their large-footprint silicon foundries and are instead farming out the work to the lowest price, high-quality bidder, many of which are offshore. In Asia, government-subsidized foundries are being built with the stated intent of cornering segments of the global manufacturing work, includ- ing memory (DRAM). Micron is still the largest manufacturer of DRAM in the world, but large fabricators are on the horizon that will give them a run for their money. One response to this commoditization is the move to "fabless manu- facturing." Major component manufacturers have realized that the actual manufacturing process, which is highly labor and capital inten- sive, has reoriented their businesses. Instead of focusing on the actual manufacturing, they focus on the design of highly specialized, custom- designed chipsets for individual clients. In effect, they become the archi- tects of the chip design and then hire a reliable manufacturer to actually build the physical component. Today, there are more than 350 fabless manufacturers in operation, and like the steel industry that learned to succeed through specialization and cost control, these companies are proving to be viable. By putting a customer's IP on a custom-designed device, a manufacturer can create a small product monopoly by offering customer-specific services instead of large-lot, capital-intensive manu- facturing-and by focusing on accuracy, cost reduction and revenue enhancement as well. Another successful direction for component manufacturers is the cre- ation of more complex system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices. As the IC-to- FPGA-to-ASIC evolution has moved inexorably forward, the need to increase functionality while reducing footprint has also increased. The end-user device that, while physically shrinking also grows in function- ality, has presented a new set of 