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The chip industry, long a bellwether for the rest of the technology economy because chips are used in almost every device, is in a bigger funk than ever.

Sales in February fell 30.4 percent to $14.2 billion from $20.3 billion a year ago, the Semiconductor Industry Associationreported this morning.

Sales were also down 7.6 percent from $15.3 billion in January, which itself was down 28 percent from a year earlier.

SIA President George Scalise said the chip industry is going through one of its steepest corrections in history. It is premature to claim that sales have hit a bottom, but Scalise said there are signs that the rate of decline has lessened from the fourth quarter of 2008. The industry has cut production and reduced inventory since late 2008.

Among the positive signs: the two largest contract chip manufacturers have said their factory utilization rates have improved, although they’re still at levels below those of a year ago. Demand is likely to continue to be below 2008 levels for at least a few quarters, with a gradual recovery to follow, Scalise said.

Compared to a year ago, sales were down steepest in Europe, which had a 36 percent drop. Japan and Asia Pacific were down 30 percent each, while the Americas were down 24 percent.

Warburg Pincus LLC has been taken off the list of the walking dead. The data did not reflect the $15 billion fund it closed last April. Walden International has now also been taken off the list. According to chairman Lip-Bu Tan, the firm raised a $285 million fund in August 2006 with a four-year investment period. VentureSource did not capture this news because Walden is a cross border fund, Tan says.Adams Capital Management has also been removed from the list, having raised $115 million last year, according to general partner Bill Frezza. Draper Richards has been removed from the list for slightly different reasons. The firm has never taken outside money because its general partners are its limited partners, financing it from the inside. It is still alive, though it did not appear to be according to our data.]

A couple weeks ago, Dan Primack of PE Hub blogged a list of venture capital firms he termed the “VC Walking Dead” — firms that by all indication appear to still be in business but lack the cash to bring new investments on board. This got us thinking. While Dan’s list included 14 firms, there had to be a lot more out there. Maybe they wouldn’t be big ones, or marquee names, but surely more firms petered out, either during the dot-com crash or soon after.

Here’s what we did: We got two big lists from the National Venture Capital Association, one with firms that had successfully raised money in 2000 and 2001, and one with firms that had survived to raise funds between 2002 and the present. We compared them side by side, determining which firms had failed to rope further funding in the last eight years. Some of these firms may not exist anymore — they’re just dead. But a surprising number, many more than PE Hub indicated, have kept the lights on somehow.

Crescendo Ventures is another firm that may not make it. Managing general partner David Spreng says he still hasn’t given up on raising a fresh fund, but he’s been actively trying for three years now. Hope is slipping out of his hands….so for now, he’s among the walking dead.

There is one other caveat with this list. Due to some incomplete data for 2009, we might have come up with a few false positives. Please let us know if you find one and we’ll make a correction. For example, our methodology had indicated that Bain Capital (which was listed misleadingly as a separate entity from Bain Capital Ventures) was a zombie firm, but we knew it just landed $475 million for its new fund in mid-February, and corrected the record.