Micron Technology: A Chip Company Born in a Dental Office Basement
Near Boise, Idaho
In nineteen seventy-eight, four engineers rented space in a dentist's basement on the south side of Boise and started drawing circuits. The company they incorporated was called Micron Technology. What they were working on was a memory chip, specifically, a dynamic random-access memory chip that would eventually make Boise one of the most consequential addresses in the global semiconductor industry.
Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis Wilson, and Doug Pitman were the founders. Startup capital came from a group of local Idaho businessmen, not from venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Boise was, at that point, not a technology city by any measure, it was a regional capital known for agriculture, government, and a modest manufacturing base.
By nineteen eighty, Micron had broken ground on its first fabrication plant and introduced the world's smallest two hundred fifty-six kilobit dynamic random-access memory chip. By nineteen ninety-four, the company had reached the Fortune five hundred. Today Micron is one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world and one of the largest employers in Idaho.
Around the same time Micron was starting up, Hewlett-Packard opened a large operation in Boise that focused on laser printers. HP Boise introduced the first LaserJet in nineteen eighty-four, which became one of the most successful technology products in the company's history. The two companies, both grounded in Boise through different paths, helped create the technology sector that the city is partly built on today.
The dental office basement is long gone. The company that started there now employs tens of thousands of people and has committed fifteen billion dollars to expand its Boise manufacturing campus.
