My computer's RAM was built by Micron Technology, a company with a high-tech name so awesomely generic it sounds like it should be the corporation that the villain runs in a early '90s techno-thriller. Micron's original manufacturing facility is located in Boise and that may be where my RAM was manufactured. However, in the last several years the company has expanded its production to Japan and Singapore.

The wireless card inside my laptop -- dubbed "AirPort Extreme" by Apple in a bit of branding that might have seemed vaguely hip in 2007 but seems embarrassing today -- is really just a run-of-the-mill 802.11n card from Broadcom. Broadcom's boring, low-slung corporate headquarters are in Irvine, California, and that's where this wireless chipset was born.

But here I mean "born" in the intellectual/theoretical sense -- it's where it was designed by Broadcom's engineers. Broadcom is what's called a fabless semiconductor company, which means that it doesn't have its own foundry, outsourcing the physical fabrication (or fab, in chip lingo) to some other company that does the grunt work. Companies that Broadcom works with to produce chips like those in my Wi-Fi card include GlobalFoundries (with factories in Singapore and Germany), Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (with factories in China), United Microelectronics Corporation (with factories in Taiwan and Singapore), and TSMC (with Taiwanese factories that also make the A5 and A6 chips in iPhones and iPads).