Strange how today's products, especially on the technology side, continue to grow smaller and smaller, but the investments made by the companies making those products are growing larger and larger. Take, for example, Toshiba and SanDisk's recent US$700 million investment in Manassas, Va.

Toshiba and SanDisk have formed a new semiconductor company, FlashVision LLC, to produce advanced flash memory at Toshiba's Dominion Semiconductor facility in Manassas. One use of flash memory will reduce the size of music CDs to a credit-card-sized item that could provide enough music for an entire week.

The saying about "good things come in small packages" must be true -- $700 million good for the state of Virginia. But with Toshiba based in Japan and SanDisk in Sunnyvale, Calif., how did the new company end up in Manassas?

"Dominion's success rate and its level of output in a relatively short period of time were key to the site selection decision," says Mark Holcomb, a spokesperson for Dominion Semiconductor, which was formed as a joint venture between Toshiba and IBM in 1995. "Toshiba knew you could get good people in Northern Virginia; it's a good environment in which to live; and there are good schools, quality of life and all of those other things. But the demand for and growth of flash memory are such that if you're going to make that kind of investment, you've got to have some assurance of technical performance, technical excellence in building the product. Dominion's success rate was probably the greatest single factor in the decision to come to Manassas."

Quick ramp-up was a critical aspect of the FlashVision decision, and hearing about Dominion's quick ramp-up helped sell Manassas to the new company's decision-makers. The Dominion facility, for example, took only 13 months from groundbreaking to tool installation, and the work-force ramp-up was equally as fast.

"When this project was announced in June of 1995, we had a group of people that could fit into a conference room," Holcomb reports. "We went from that to 1,000 employees in 4.5 years. It was a very, very rapid ramp-up."

Of course, with unemployment rates below 4 percent in Northern Virginia, labor was a concern for the new joint venture. According to Holcomb, however, Dominion has had no problems in finding workers.

The ability to fill positions is in part due to Dominion's in-house certification program and Northern Virginia's work-force development efforts at the community college level. Northern Virginia Community College has a 14-month program that focuses on the skills needed at Dominion for technicians who do maintenance, says Holcomb. FlashVision also received as part of the state's incentive package a tax break to offset the cost of training.