Macronix

Founded in 1989 in Hsinchu by Miin Wu, who brought Silicon Valley experience home to Taiwan. The speciality is non-volatile memory: NOR flash, where Macronix has long jostled with Spansion and Winbond for the top spot, and mask ROM, where the contents are fixed during manufacturing.

Mask ROM is a niche almost everyone else has abandoned, but it is cheap in volume and impossible to overwrite. That is why Macronix has supplied the memory in Nintendo game cards across several console generations. It also makes NOR parts for cars, where guaranteed long-term supply matters more than price.