Those companies each ship hundreds of millions of units per year, but they have loyal suppliers like Freescale Semiconductor, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm that were not easy to displace.
Semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments Monday reported better than expected quarterly earnings and revenues, despite sharply lower sales of the baseband processors used to connect handsets to wireless networks.
In the case of silicon, it's galloped for 41 years, ever since Fairchild Semiconductor and Texas Instruments shrunk a transistor from three dimensions into two and etched it in silicon.