But the media - and just about everybody else - latched on to the idea that the microchip industry was developing at an exponential rate.

In the 80's, it was the microchip industry.

The business he founded 17 years ago, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is the goliath of Taiwan's modern microchip industry and the world's biggest manufacturer of made-to-order chips.

The next generation of top-of-the-range smartphones, already being called "superphones", will be powered by new technologies revealed by ARM, the Cambridge-based firm that has come to dominate the mobile microchip industry.

At that time (as it is now), the microchip industry was dominated by automated design and layout tools.

But to win its case, the commission must show that Intel not only hurt rivals, if any of the three companies are in fact rivals, but that it also hurt competition within the microchip industry.

WHEN the fund went into a precipitous slide, as Mr. Wick kept it invested in semiconductor stocks when things turned sour for the microchip industry.

The whole of the microchip industry for making computers is based on the chemistry of silicon.

Yesterday was a calling-all-lawyers day for the volatile segment of the microchip industry that makes memory devices for personal computers and other electronic products.

Now, using technologies adapted from the microchip industry, it may soon be possible to make accelerometers so inexpensive that they will creep even further into everyday life.