Siemens AG last week tried to allay fears that Plessey Co Plc’s chip business would become no more than a branch office of its own merchant semiconductor business – but all the quotations reported in the Financial Times left the opposite impression to the one intended, implying that most of the innovative work that Plessey has done over the past three or four years – that led to contracts such as the one for the applications-specific chips for ATE Corp’s wristwatch data receivers – will be abandoned and that the business will narrowly focus on the needs of GEC and Siemens for custom circuits, that applications-specific circuits only might continue to be Plessey’s main province, and that its pioneering work on Gallium Arsenide – and the new plant in Devon, might be abandoned.
