 The breakthrough could result in cheaper and far more efficient microprocessors and consumer electronics products, industry experts have said. The company was also named one of the winners of the 2002 Baldrige Award for business excellence in December of that year. Motorola won in the manufacturing category. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, named for the late commerce secretary who served in the Reagan administration, was established by Congress in 1987 to boost the competitiveness of American companies. It goes to U.S. companies judged to be exemplary in the seven areas of leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, information and analysis, focus on human resources, process management and results. Where the chips fall In July 2003, Motorola fell from the ranks of the world's largest makers of semiconductors for the first time since the company built its original chip plant in 1959. The company fell from the top 10 ranking, according to a report issued by research firm IC Insights. The ranking was based on sales in the first six months of 2003. Motorola's chip sales in the first half of 2003 fell 5 percent to $2.27 billion from the same period in the previous year, $300 million less than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which was in 10th place, IC Insights said. It was the only chipmaker in the top 11 that registered a sales decline in that period. This comes on the heels of a year of bad news in 2002, when the company announced that due to market forces and continued restructuring, it was cutting 7,000 jobs and taking $3.5 billion in charges to restructure its business and write down the value of some of its assets. The company's then-CEO Christopher Galvin said in a statement that the company was trying to resize its operations to where it was in the mid-1990s and that the company was not assuming that the rapid growth in the demand for its products seen in the late 1990s would return. And the bad news just kept coming. By mid-2002 Motorola also announced it was seeing a sales de