I highly doubt that John Deere operates any semiconductor foundries. Those foundries aren't your normal run of the mill factories. They are $10B monsters just to get started.
To be clear, I never said anything about "semiconductor foundries" (I can only hazard a guess as to what this might mean), I said "semiconductor company".
Looks like standard electronics manufacturing; nothing state-of-the-art. It's still interesting that they chose to design and manufacture it all in-house.
I didn't mean to imply that it was in some way non-standard or state-of-the-art; only that they do, in fact, manufacture some of their electronics in-house.
I don't see any evidence there that they manufacture semiconductors, only electronics. Manufacturing electronics isn't that hard, depending on what exactly you're doing. Assembling printed circuit boards from components is something you can even do by hand in most cases, and automated assembly equipment isn't really that expensive to set up a small factory, depending on the volume required (small-volume stuff isn't that expensive, high-volume high-speed stuff is more so). Manufacturing semiconductors is something else altogether, and isn't something you can do in a small warehouse with a few hundred $K of equipment; it requires very specialized buildings and equipment.
