The sexy R&D behind boring chip companies By: CNBC.com News August 08, 2014 at 10:15 AM EDT As the silicon chip nears its theoretical limit of productivity, semiconductor companies are in an R&D arms race to drive future chip innovation. Read More >> Related Stocks: Altera Corp Amazon.com Applied Materials Credit Suisse Group Credit Suisse Group ADR Facebook Google, Inc. Lam Research McKesson Corp Microsemi Corporation - Common Stock Netflix Piper Jaffray Companies Salesforce SanDisk Corp Silicon Labs Inc Taiwan Semiconductor ADR Texas Instruments Tokyo Electron Ltd Twitter, Inc. Xilinx