Semiconductors Quotes

It does little good to forecast the future of semiconductors or energy, or the future of the family (even one's own family), if the forecast springs from the premise that everything else will remain unchanged. For nothing will remain unchanged. The future is fluid, not frozen. It is constructed by our shifting and changing daily decisions, and each event influences all others.

What NASA did for semiconductor companies was teach them to make chips of near-perfect quality, to make them fast, in huge volumes, and to make them cheaper, faster, and better with each year.

It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible. [Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.]

the best semiconductor engineers in the country

The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one

Sir Isaac Newton famously said that he had achieved everything by standing on the shoulders of giants—the scientific men whose findings he built upon. The same might be said about silicon. After germanium did all the work, silicon became an icon, and germanium was banished to periodic table obscurity.

For example, the lithographic process used to lay out integrated circuits was initially based on optical imaging techniques. When the size of individual device elements shrank to the point where the wavelength of visible light was too long to allow for further progress, the semiconductor industry moved on to X-ray lithography.

The relentless acceleration of computer hardware over decades suggests that we’ve somehow managed to remain on the steep part of the S-curve for far longer than has been possible in other spheres of technology. The reality, however, is that Moore’s Law has involved successfully climbing a staircase of cascading S-curves, each representing a specific semiconductor fabrication technology.

Yokoi was the first to admit it. “I don’t have any particular specialist skills,” he once said. “I have a sort of vague knowledge of everything.” He advised young employees not just to play with technology for its own sake, but to play with ideas. Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings. . . . That can be left to the experts.” He argued, “Everyone takes the approach of learning detailed, complex skills. If no one did this then there wouldn’t be people who shine as engineers. . . . Looking at me, from the engineer’s perspective, it’s like, ‘Look at this idiot,’ but once you’ve got a couple hit products under your belt, this word ‘idiot’ seems to slip away somewhere.

Historians are wont to name technological advances as the great milestones of culture, among them the development of the plow, the discovery of smelting and metalworking, the invention of the clock, printing press, steam power, electric engine, lightbulb, semiconductor, and computer. But possibly even more transforming than any of these was the recognition by Greek philosophers and their intellectual descendants that human beings could examine, comprehend, and eventually even guide or control their own thought process, emotions, and resulting behavior. With that realization we became something new and different on earth: the only animal that, by examining its own cerebration and behavior, could alter them. This, surely, was a giant step in evolution. Although we are physically little different from the people of three thousand years ago, we are culturally a different species. We are the psychologizing animal.

Some 80 percent of the world’s high-quality quartz that ultimately makes up electronic-grade silicon comes from a single mine in North Freakin’ Carolina. Want to remain modern? You pretty much must get along well with the Americans. They will soon have something they have never had: resource control over the base material of the Digital Age. (They’re also going to do pretty well dominating the overall high-end semiconductor space, but that particular breakdown is in the next chapter.)

The orchestra musician’s plight caught the interest of Harvard researcher Richard Hackman, who was studying the job satisfaction of workers employed in a variety of industries. Orchestral musicians were near the bottom, scoring lower in job satisfaction and overall happiness than airline flight attendants, mental health treatment teams, beer salesmen, government economic analysts, and even federal prison guards. Only operating room nurses and semiconductor fabrication teams scored lower than these musicians.

By 1996 Apple’s share of the market had fallen to 4% from a high of 16% in the late 1980s. Michael Spindler, the German-born chief of Apple’s European operations who had replaced Sculley as CEO in 1993, tried to sell the company to Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. That failed, and he was ousted in February 1996 and replaced by Gil Amelio, a research engineer who was CEO of National Semiconductor. During his first year the company lost $1 billion, and the stock price, which had been $70 in 1991, fell to $14, even as the tech bubble was pushing other stocks into the stratosphere.

We will not go into businesses where technology which is way over my head is crucial to the investment decision. I know about as much about semi-conductors or integrated circuits as I do of the mating habits of the chrzaszcz. (That’s a Polish May bug, students—if you have trouble pronouncing it, rhyme it with thrzaszcz.) Furthermore,

We seem unwilling to allow for the possibility that the glory of our species may lie not only in the launch of satellites, the founding of companies and the manufacture of miraculously thin semi-conductors, but also in an ability -- even if it is widely distributed among billions -- to spoon yoghurt into small mouths, find missing socks, clean toilets, deal with tantrums and wipe congealed things off tables. Here, too, there are trials worthy not of condemnation or sarcastic ridicule but of a degree of glamour, so that they may be endured with greater sympathy and fortitude.

One of those was Gary Bradski, an expert in machine vision at Intel Labs in Santa Clara. The company was the world’s largest chipmaker and had developed a manufacturing strategy called “copy exact,” a way of developing next-generation manufacturing techniques to make ever-smaller chips. Intel would develop a new technology at a prototype facility and then export that process to wherever it planned to produce the denser chips in volume. It was a system that required discipline, and Bradski was a bit of a “Wild Duck”—a term that IBM originally used to describe employees who refused to fly in formation—compared to typical engineers in Intel’s regimented semiconductor manufacturing culture. A refugee from the high-flying finance world of “quants” on the East Coast, Bradski arrived at Intel in 1996 and was forced to spend a year doing boring grunt work, like developing an image-processing software library for factory automation applications. After paying his dues, he was moved to the chipmaker’s research laboratory and started researching interesting projects. Bradski had grown up in Palo Alto before leaving to study physics and artificial intelligence at Berkeley and Boston University. He returned because he had been bitten by the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial bug.

At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett-Packard for a long time. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think that it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it’s Apple and Google—and a little more so Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It’s been around for a while, but it’s still at the cutting edge of what’s going on. It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance. They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, if it was his goal. I admire him for the company he built—it’s impressive—and I enjoyed working with him. He’s bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn’t

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

Bell resisted selling Texas Instruments a license. “This business is not for you,” the firm was told. “We don’t think you can do it.”38 In the spring of 1952, Haggerty was finally able to convince Bell Labs to let Texas Instruments buy a license to manufacture transistors. He also hired away Gordon Teal, a chemical researcher who worked on one of Bell Labs’ long corridors near the semiconductor team. Teal was an expert at manipulating germanium, but by the time he joined Texas Instruments he had shifted his interest to silicon, a more plentiful element that could perform better at high temperatures. By May 1954 he was able to fabricate a silicon transistor that used the n-p-n junction architecture developed by Shockley. Speaking at a conference that month, near the end of reading a thirty-one-page paper that almost put listeners to sleep, Teal shocked the audience by declaring, “Contrary to what my colleagues have told you about the bleak prospects for silicon transistors, I happen to have a few of them here in my pocket.” He proceeded to dunk a germanium transistor connected to a record player into a beaker of hot oil, causing it to die, and then did the same with one of his silicon transistors, during which Artie Shaw’s “Summit Ridge Drive” continued to blare undiminished. “Before the session ended,” Teal later said, “the astounded audience was scrambling for copies of the talk, which we just happened to bring along.”39 Innovation happens in stages. In the case of the transistor, first there was the invention, led by Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain. Next came the production, led by engineers such as Teal. Finally, and equally important, there were the entrepreneurs who figured out how to conjure up new markets. Teal’s plucky boss Pat Haggerty was a colorful case study of this third step in the innovation process.

In opting for large scale, Korean state planners got much of what they bargained for. Korean companies today compete globally with the Americans and Japanese in highly capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, aerospace, consumer electronics, and automobiles, where they are far ahead of most Taiwanese or Hong Kong companies. Unlike Southeast Asia, the Koreans have moved into these sectors not primarily through joint ventures where the foreign partner has provided a turnkey assembly plant but through their own indigenous organizations. So successful have the Koreans been that many Japanese companies feel relentlessly dogged by Korean competitors in areas like semiconductors and steel. The chief advantage that large-scale chaebol organizations would appear to provide is the ability of the group to enter new industries and to ramp up to efficient production quickly through the exploitation of economies of scope.70 Does this mean, then, that cultural factors like social capital and spontaneous sociability are not, in the end, all that important, since a state can intervene to fill the gap left by culture? The answer is no, for several reasons. In the first place, not every state is culturally competent to run as effective an industrial policy as Korea is. The massive subsidies and benefits handed out to Korean corporations over the years could instead have led to enormous abuse, corruption, and misallocation of investment funds. Had President Park and his economic bureaucrats been subject to political pressures to do what was expedient rather than what they believed was economically beneficial, if they had not been as export oriented, or if they had simply been more consumption oriented and corrupt, Korea today would probably look much more like the Philippines. The Korean economic and political scene was in fact closer to that of the Philippines under Syngman Rhee in the 1950s. Park Chung Hee, for all his faults, led a disciplined and spartan personal lifestyle and had a clear vision of where he wanted the country to go economically. He played favorites and tolerated a considerable degree of corruption, but all within reasonable bounds by the standards of other developing countries. He did not waste money personally and kept the business elite from putting their resources into Swiss villas and long vacations on the Riviera.71 Park was a dictator who established a nasty authoritarian political system, but as an economic leader he did much better. The same power over the economy in different hands could have led to disaster. There are other economic drawbacks to state promotion of large-scale industry. The most common critique made by market-oriented economists is that because the investment was government rather than market driven, South Korea has acquired a series of white elephant industries such as shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and heavy manufacturing. In an age that rewards downsizing and nimbleness, the Koreans have created a series of centralized and inflexible corporations that will gradually lose their low-wage competitive edge. Some cite Taiwan’s somewhat higher overall rate of economic growth in the postwar period as evidence of the superior efficiency of a smaller, more competitive industrial structure.

Mosaic also marked a new stage in the evolution of the power law. Venture-capital returns are dominated by grand slams partly because of the dynamics of startups: most young businesses fail, but the ones that gain traction can grow exponentially. This is true of fashion brands or hotel chains as well as technology companies. But tech-focused venture portfolios are dominated by the power law for an additional reason: tech startups are founded upon technologies that may themselves progress exponentially. Because of his experience and temperament, Doerr was especially attuned to this phenomenon. As a young engineer at Intel, he had seen how Moore’s law transformed the value of companies that used semiconductors: the power of chips was doubling every two years, so startups that put them to good use could make better, cheaper products. For any given modem, digital watch, or personal computer, the cost of the semiconductors inside the engine would fall by 50 percent in two years, 75 percent in four years, and 87.5 percent in eight. With that sort of wind at a tech startup’s back, no wonder profits could grow exponentially. Mosaic, and the internet more generally, turbocharged this phenomenon. Again, Doerr grasped this better than most others. As well as working at Intel, he had known Bob Metcalfe, so he understood that Metcalfe’s law was even more explosive than Moore’s law. Rather than merely doubling in power every two years, as semiconductors did, the value of a network would rise as the square of the number of users.[70] Progress would thus be quadratic rather than merely exponential; something that keeps on squaring will soon grow a lot faster than something that keeps on doubling. Moreover, progress would not be tethered to the passage of time; it would be a function of the number of users. At the moment when Doerr met Clark, the number of internet users was about to triple over the next two years, meaning that the value of the network would jump ninefold, an effect massively more powerful than the mere doubling in the power of semiconductors over that same period. What’s more, Metcalfe’s law was not supplanting Moore’s law, which would have been dramatic enough. Rather, it was compounding it. The explosion of internet traffic would be fueled both by its rapid growth in usefulness (Metcalfe’s law) and by the falling cost of modems and computers (Moore’s law).[71] After listening to Clark’s pitch, Doerr was determined to invest. A magical browser that attracted millions to the internet had almost limitless potential. The price Doerr had to pay was secondary.

And then came the second wave of chaos theory, which revealed that chaos itself, belying its misleading name, contained a stunning new kind of order. The pivotal discovery was made by the physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum, who showed that there are certain universal laws governing the transition from regular to chaotic behavior. Roughly speaking, completely different systems can go chaotic in the same way. His predictions were soon confirmed in experiments on electronic circuits, swirling fluids, chemical reactions, semiconductors, and heart cells. It was as if the old Pythagorean dream had come true: The world was not made of earth, air, fire, and water—it was made of number. Feigenbaum’s laws transcended the superficial differences between heart cells and silicon semiconductors. Different materials, the same laws of chaos. Other universal laws would soon be discovered.

Josephson junctions have also been considered as possible components for a new generation of supercomputers. One attractive feature is their raw speed: They can be switched on and off at frequencies of several hundred billion cycles per second. But perhaps even more important, Josephson transistors produce a thousand times less heat than conventional semiconductors, which means they can be packed tighter on a chip without burning themselves up. Dense packing is always desirable because smaller computers are faster. By using less wire, they are less burdened by the speed of light, which ultimately determines the time it takes for signals to travel from one part of the circuitry to another.

I want to share with you the thought that chemistry provides the infrastructure of the modern world. There is hardly an item of everyday life that is not furnished by it or based on the materials it has created. Take away chemistry and its functional arm the chemical industry and you take away the metals and other materials of construction, the semiconductors of computation and communication, the fuels of heating, power generation, and transport, the fabrics of clothing and furnishings, and the artificial pigments of our blazingly colourful world. Take away its contributions to agriculture and you let people die, for the industry provides the fertilizers and pesticides that enable dwindling lands to support rising populations. Take away its pharmaceutical wing and you allow pain through the elimination of anaesthetics and deny people the prospect of recovery by the elimination of medicines. Imagine a world where there are no products of chemistry (including pure water): you are back before the Bronze Age, into the Stone Age: no metals, no fuels except wood, no fabrics except pelts, no medicines except herbs, no methods of computation except with your fingers, and very little food.

But Burlington’s big post–World War II turning point came with the arrival in the late 1950s of what eventually turned out to be one of IBM’s major semiconductor works, in the suburb of Essex Junction, just east of Burlington. At its peak, the IBM factory employed some eight thousand engineers and technical workers. Its staff fell to about three thousand (and IBM has sold the works to another company, a Silicon Valley spin-off called GlobalFoundries). But its influence on Burlington remains profound.

Xi is quite comfortable using China’s huge market power and deep pockets to suck up advanced technologies from abroad and into China. The aim of achieving self-reliance in semi-conductors, batteries, and other crucially important technologies has become increasingly overt. With the hands of the state so obviously orchestrating this massive effort, it is no wonder that China is provoking a backlash in the United States and Europe.

TSMC has been building an increasingly rich ecosystem for over 25 years and feedback from partners is that they see benefits sooner and more consistently than when dealing with other foundries

My journey through Magee’s Disease was difficult and brought an understanding about what is wrong with the USA. Any company that is hiring workers into known toxic jobs that require them to use company supplied medications and oxygen to treat their “Summit Brain” needs to be shut down by the USA government. Instead, we see the USA government facilitating their toxic corporate culture for the foreseeable future with their construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This is being done with the full support of USA government law enforcement, even though working on the very high altitude Mauna Kea makes some of them sick! To build it, they need to arrest the native Hawaiians that regard Mauna Kea as their sacred temple that is being desecrated by corporate science. The main finance to start the TMT project has come from Gordon Moore, the founder of the USA based semiconductor manufacturer Intel.

how special the early years of the semiconductor industry, from the ‘60s to the ‘90s, were, especially in regard to the productive, informal relationships between all stakeholders. Company founders, managers, process, design and test engineers, supervisors, maintenance technicians and hourly operators all contributed to the success of their companies

The eight traitors — a metallurgist, Sheldon Roberts; three physicists, Jean Hoerni, Jay Last and Robert Noyce; an electrical engineer, Victor Grinich; an industrial engineer, Eugene Kleiner; a mechanical engineer, Julius Blank and Gordon Moore, a physical chemist — formed Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild became enormously successful. Shockley Labs closed in 1968.

Venture capital has succeeded mainly when high-potential industries are emerging. Historically, VCs earned high returns from emerging, high-potential industries such as semiconductors, personal computers, biotechnology, and telecommunications in the 1970s and 1980s; Internet 1.0 in the 1990s; and Internet 2.0 in the 2000s. When there are no major industries at the emerging stage, VC returns have fallen.

engineer, along with a hundred others, began his hike that night near Samsung’s Everland theme park, traversing the mountains around Yongin—a distance of sixty-four kilometers (about forty miles)—through the day and overnight. The hike was designed to test the team’s mental toughness as they prepared to race forward making a 64K DRAM chipset, an early semiconductor used in calculators.

New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.

A STEADY STREAM of semiconductor inventions emerged from Bell Labs between 1950 and 1960. Some had arisen from Baker’s research department and others from the much larger development department. As a result, there were now a multitude of new transistor types and important new methods of manufacturing, such as the technique—resembling art etchings done on a minuscule scale—known as photolithography.

Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild had different, better ideas. Both men, nearly simultaneously, came up with the idea of constructing all of the components in a circuit out of silicon, so that a complete circuit could exist within one piece—one chip—of semiconductor material. By eliminating the tyranny of interconnections, the method seemed to suggest substantial advantages in manufacturing and operational speed. Their innovation could, in short, be better and cheaper. Kilby had the idea in the summer of 1958, probably a few months earlier than Noyce. But Noyce’s design was arguably more elegant and more useful.

Two decades later, when the American semiconductor industry was facing an all-out battle with Japanese competitors, U.S. electronics companies complained loudly that Japanese firms had an unfair advantage because much of their development funds were provided by the government in Tokyo. On this point, the American manufacturers lived in glass houses. The government in Washington—specifically, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Defense Department—played a crucial role in the development of the American semiconductor industry. The Apollo project was the most glamorous early application of the chip, but there were numerous other rocket and weapons programs that provided research funds and, more important, large markets when the chip was still too expensive to compete against traditional circuits in civilian applications. A study published in 1977 reported that the government provided just under half of all the research and development money spent by the U.S. electronics industry in the first sixteen years of the chip’s existence.

Looking at the turnover and quality of managers in charge of sales and marketing is a good way to gauge how much the company values this part of the business. One important element of this principle is knowing which numbers matter the most to a company’s bottom line. For example, many Software-as-a-Service businesses have a tremendous amount of free users (who cost the business money in server fees). Still, they have a difficult time converting these free users into paying customers. So when reading a company’s annual or quarterly report, focus on figures such as the number of paying customers or average customer purchase value. Rather than relying on misleading numbers like “total users” or “monthly average users.” These are often used by unprofitable companies to make their prospects look more attractive than they are. Another essential element of this principle is that a company’s income is not reliant on a single factor. For example, if a semiconductor manufacturer relies on a contract with Apple for 80% of its revenue, then Apple ending that contract would plunge the economics of that business into disarray. This is

By the 1960s, the price had fallen to $8 or so per transistor. By 1972, the year of my birth, the average cost of a transistor had fallen to 15 cents,6 and the semiconductor industry was churning out between 100 billion and 1 trillion transistors a year. By 2014, humanity produced 250 billion billion transistors annually: 25 times the number of stars in the Milky Way. Each second, the world’s ‘fabs’ – the specialised factories that turn out transistors – spewed out 8 trillion transistors.7 The cost of a transistor had dropped to a few billionths of a dollar.

Scientists and engineers tend to divide their work into two large categories, sometimes described as basic research and directed research. Some of the most crucial inventions and discoveries of the modern world have come about through basic research—that is, work that was not directed toward any particular use. Albert Einstein’s picture of the universe, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Niels Bohr’s blueprint of the atomic nucleus, the Watson-Crick “double helix” model of DNA—all these have had enormous practical implications, but they all came out of basic research. There are just as many basic tools of modern life—the electric light, the telephone, vitamin pills, the Internet—that resulted from a clearly focused effort to solve a particular problem. In a sense, this distinction between basic and directed research encompasses the difference between science and engineering. Scientists, on the whole, are driven by the thirst for knowledge; their motivation, as the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman put it, is “the joy of finding things out.” Engineers, in contrast, are solution-driven. Their joy is making things work. The monolithic idea was an engineering solution. It worked around the tyranny of numbers by reducing the numbers to one: a complete circuit would consist of just one part—a single (“monolithic”) block of semiconductor material containing all the components and all the interconnections of the most complex circuit designs. The tangible product of that idea, known to engineers as the monolithic integrated circuit and to the world at large as the semiconductor chip, has changed the world as fundamentally as did the telephone, the light bulb, and the horseless carriage. The integrated circuit is the heart of clocks, computers, cameras, and calculators, of pacemakers and Palm Pilots, of deep-space probes and deep-sea sensors, of toasters, typewriters, cell phones, and Internet servers. The National Academy of Sciences declared the integrated circuit the progenitor of the “Second Industrial Revolution.” The first Industrial Revolution enhanced man’s physical prowess and freed people from the drudgery of backbreaking manual labor; the revolution spawned by the chip enhances our intellectual prowess and frees people from the drudgery of mind-numbing computational labor. A British physicist, Sir Ieuan Madlock, Her Majesty’s Chief Science Advisor, called the integrated circuit “the most remarkable technology ever to hit mankind.” A California businessman, Jerry Sanders, founder of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., offered a more pointed assessment: “Integrated circuits are the crude oil of the eighties.” All

According to the latest report of PAMA (Pakistan Automotive Manufacturers Association), we witnessed a greatest achievement of Suzuki Alto in Dec 2021. Interesting fact is Suzuki suspended booking of Suzuki Alto VXL for a while, because the AGS/VXL variant cut out of production because of the shortage of semiconductor chip. How They Achieve This Landmark? There are few simple reasons behind it, they didn’t compromise on the quality of their procurement. There are few factors which enhances car performance, including installation of Quality tires, because Pakistan’s road qualities are below the average, so the maintenance of the car tires are so important. Various tires brands claims that they are best in the business, but according to the performance, no brand ever achieve the landmark what Maxxis achieved. If you are car owner and want to change or update your car tires and didn’t knew how to identify your car suitable tires, you can purchase it from Maxxis.pk, or visit our nearest affiliated outlet. Maxxis.pk is only Tire Dealer of Maxxis brand in Pakistan, and can only found at Maxxis affiliated outlets. Faisalabad, Lahore, Islamabad, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Sheikhupura are some of the leading cities, however you can find these Quality tires all over Pakistan. If not Maxxis then you can visit Tyre Dealers official website and grab your tires.

DIFFUSED SILICON had another use, too. Fifteen years had passed since the day Walter Brattain had been ushered into Mervin Kelly’s office to regard a strange piece of silicon that had been discovered down in Holmdel, New Jersey. The men had shone a light on the blackened chunk and the resulting electric charge had stunned them. In later years it came to be understood that this chunk of silicon contained a naturally occurring p-n junction where two types of silicon met. The junction is extremely photosensitive. In very general terms, the photons in light are hitting the semiconductor crystal and “splitting off” electrons from their normal location in the crystal; the process, if properly captured, can create a flow of electrons, that is, a flow of electricity.13 Kelly and Brattain and Ohl didn’t know it at the time, but in Kelly’s office the men had been looking at the world’s first crude silicon solar cell.

Shockley recalled later that his “first notebook entry on what might have been a working [solid-state amplifier] was as I recall late 1939.”19 It was actually December 29, 1939. Shockley had concluded by then that a certain class of materials known as semiconductors—so named because they are neither good conductors of electricity (like copper) nor good insulators of electricity (like glass), but somewhere in between—might be an ideal solid replacement for tubes.

Double diffusion made possible, for the first time, the mass production of precise, high-performance transistors. The technique promised to be highly profitable for any organization that could master its technical intricacies. Shockley therefore quit Bell Labs and, with financial backing from Arnold Beckman, president of a prestigious maker of scientific instruments, started a company to produce double-diffusion transistors. The inventor recruited the best young minds he could find, including Noyce; Gordon Moore, a physical chemist from Johns Hopkins; and Jean Hoerni, a Swiss-born physicist whose strength was in theory. Already thinking about human intelligence, Shockley made each of his recruits take a battery of psychological tests. The results described Noyce as an introvert, a conclusion so ludicrous that it should have told Shockley something about the value of such tests. Early in 1956, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories opened for business in the sunny valley south of Palo Alto. It was the first electronics firm in what was to become Silicon Valley.

Under certain circumstances semiconductors are also known to be good “rectifiers”; that is, they allow an electric current passing through them to move in only one direction. This property made them potentially useful in certain kinds of electronic circuits. Shockley believed there could be a way to get them to amplify a current as well. He intuited that one common semiconductor—copper oxide—was a good place to start.

In Robert Noyce’s office there hung a black-and-white photo that showed a jovial crew of young scientists offering a champagne toast to the smiling William Shockley. The picture was taken on November 1, 1956, a few hours after the news of Shockley’s Nobel Prize had reached Palo Alto. By the time that happy picture was taken, however, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories was a chaotic and thoroughly unhappy place. For all his technical expertise, Shockley had proven to be an inexpert manager. He was continually shifting his researchers from one job to another; he couldn’t seem to make up his mind what, if anything, the company was trying to produce. “There was a group that worked for Shockley that was pretty unhappy,” Noyce recalled many years later. “And that group went to Beckman and said, hey, this isn’t working. . . . About that time, Shockley got his Nobel Prize. And Beckman was sort of between the devil and the deep blue sea. He couldn’t fire Shockley, who had just gotten this great international honor, but he had to change the management or else everyone else would leave.” In the end, Beckman stuck with Shockley—and paid a huge price. Confused and frustrated, eight of the young scientists, including Noyce, Moore, and Hoerni, decided to look for another place to work. That first group—Shockley called them “the traitorous eight”—turned out to be pioneers, for they established a pattern that has been followed time and again in Silicon Valley ever since. They decided to offer themselves as a team to whichever employer made the best offer. Word of this unusual proposal reached an investment banker in New York, who offered a counterproposal: Instead of working for somebody else, the eight scientists should start their own firm. The banker knew of an investor who would provide the backing—the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, which had been looking hard for an entrée to the transistor business. A deal was struck. Each of the eight young scientists put up $500 in earnest money, the corporate angel put up all the rest, and early in 1957 the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation opened for business, a mile or so down the road from Shockley’s operation.

Noyce recalled that the group had some slight qualms about running their own business, but these doubts were easily overcome by “the realization, for the first time, that you had a chance at making more money than you ever dreamed of.” The dream, as it happened, came true. Even by high-tech standards, that $500 turned out to be a spectacular investment. In 1968 the founders sold their share of Fairchild Semiconductor back to the parent company; Noyce’s proceeds—the return on his initial $500 investment—came to $250,000. Noyce and his friend Gordon Moore had by then found another financial backer and started a new firm, Intel Corporation (the name is a play on both Intelligence and Integrated Electronics). Intel started out making chips for computer memories, a business that took off like a rocket. Intel’s shares were traded publicly for the first time in 1971—on the same day, coincidentally, that Playboy Enterprises went public.

Noyce recalled that the group had some slight qualms about running their own business, but these doubts were easily overcome by “the realization, for the first time, that you had a chance at making more money than you ever dreamed of.” The dream, as it happened, came true. Even by high-tech standards, that $500 turned out to be a spectacular investment. In 1968 the founders sold their share of Fairchild Semiconductor back to the parent company; Noyce’s proceeds—the return on his initial $500 investment—came to $250,000. Noyce and his friend Gordon Moore had by then found another financial backer and started a new firm, Intel Corporation (the name is a play on both Intelligence and Integrated Electronics). Intel started out making chips for computer memories, a business that took off like a rocket. Intel’s shares were traded publicly for the first time in 1971—on the same day, coincidentally, that Playboy Enterprises went public. On that first day, stock in the two firms was about equally priced; a year later, Intel’s shares were worth more than twice as much as Playboy’s. “Wall Street has spoken,” an investment analyst observed. “It’s memories over mammaries.” Today, Intel is a multibillion-dollar company, and anybody who held on to the founding group’s stake in the company is a billionaire several times over.

Long ago, the dream of an electronic switch had prompted Kelly’s initial push on semiconductors. As the Fortune story pointed out, a switching office with 65,000 electromechanical relays could do “slightly less than 1,000 switching operations a second.” Transistors—using a fraction of the power and lasting far longer—could potentially do a million.

The 2011 Chinese National Patent Development Strategy highlighted seven industries to focus on in the coming decade: biotechnology, high-end equipment manufacturing, broadband infrastructure, high-end semiconductors, energy conservation, alternative energy, and clean-energy vehicles. In 2017, it added artificial intelligence to the list.

These low-cost “ETFs” sometimes offer the only means by which an investor can gain entrée to a narrow market like, say, companies based in Belgium or stocks in the semiconductor industry. Other index ETFs offer much broader market exposure. However, they are generally not suitable for investors who wish to add money regularly, since most brokers will charge a separate commission on every new investment you make.

granddaddy of them all appeared: application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). As the name implies, ASICs are application-specific, meaning that the physical hardware must be designed and manufactured with the application in mind. CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs can all be bought generically and, with proper engineering, be applied to a specific purpose after the purchase. The physical layout of ASICs, on the other hand, needs to be etched into the chip at the semiconductor fabrication factory.

Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives

Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications, banking and financial services, manufacturing, transportation, aerospace

fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse. • An integrated family of application construction tools that automate the Rational Approach throughout the software lifecycle. • Technical consulting services delivered by our worldwide field organization of software engineers and technical sales professionals. Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications, banking and financial services, manufacturing, transportation, aerospace, and defense.They construct software applications for a wide range of platforms, from microprocessors embedded in telephone switching systems to enterprisewide information systems running on company-specific intranets. Rational Software Corporation is traded on the NASDAQ system under the symbol RATL.1

The introduction of networked lights is happening because of another trend. Manufacturers have been replacing incandescent and fluorescent lights with ultra-efficient LEDs, or light-emitting diodes. The U.S. Department of Energy says that LEDs had 4 percent of the U.S. lighting market in 2013, but it predicts this figure will rise to 74 percent of all lights by 2030. Because LEDs are solid-state devices that emit light from a semiconductor chip, they already sit on a circuit board. That means they can readily share space with sensors, wireless chips, and a small computer, allowing light fixtures to become networked sensor hubs. For example, last year Philips gave outside developers access to the software that runs its Hue line of residential LED lights. Now it’s possible to download Goldee, a smartphone app that turns your house the color of a Paris sunset, or Ambify, a $2.99 app created by a German programmer that makes the lights flash to music as in a jukebox.

STARTUP THINKING New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.

Note: The ICT industry, as defined by the Bank of Korea, includes both ICT device manufacturing (office, computing and accounting machinery and semiconductors and telecom devices) and ICT services (telecommunications, broadcasting, software and computer

Perhaps the most common device for giving people focus and direction is goal setting, but goals, as often as they are used, have their pros and cons. Sure, if you can convince everybody that profits must increase 20% next quarter or we’re going out of business, people will hurry around looking for ways to hype profits by 20%. When discussing “mission” I assigned Susan a goal of 25% improvement in sales, based on what I calculated was needed to avoid closing the factory and on what I felt her district could reasonably provide. It was not a number pulled from the ether, and I went to some length to explain this to her. Short of any such basis in reality, people will often do the easiest things, such as firing 20% of the workforce, canceling vital R&D programs, or simply not making any payments to suppliers. In other words, they will take achieving the goal as seriously as they feel you were in setting it; they will sense whether you have positioned yourself at the Schwerpunkt. Goals, as we all know, can be motivators. Cypress Semiconductor, a communications-oriented company founded in 1982, used to have a computer that tracked the thousands of self-imposed goals that its people fed into the system. Cypress founder T. J. Rodgers identified this automated goal tending system as the heart of his management style and a big factor in the company’s early success.136 Frankly, I find this philosophy depressing, not to mention a temptation to focus inward: If the boss places great importance on entering and tracking goals, as he obviously does, then that is what the other employees are going to consider important.137 In any case, what’s the big deal about meeting or missing a goal? A goal is an intention at a point in time. It is, to a large extent, an arbitrary target, whether you set it or someone above you assigns it. And we all know that numerical goals can be gamed, like banking (delaying) sales that we could have made this quarter to help us make quota next quarter. Unlike a Schwerpunkt, which gives focus and direction for chaotic and uncertain situations, what does a goal tell you? Just keep your head down and continue plugging away?

RIM’s chief saw the semiconductor giant as a dangerous, tricky heavyweight whose every employee lived by former CEO Andy Grove’s mantra, “Only the paranoid survive.

[P]erhaps the burrows in which our lives were spent really were dark and dirty, and perhaps we ourselves were well suited to these burrows, but in the blue sky above our heads, up among the thinly scattered stars, there were special, artificial points of gleaming light, creeping unhurriedly through the constellations, points created here out of steel, semiconductors, and electricity, and now flying through space. And every one of us, even the blue-faced alcoholic we had passed on the way here, huddling like a toad in a snowdrift, even Mitiok's brother, and of course Mitiok and I — we all had our own little embassy up there in the cold pure blueness.

A brief look at the role of tested building blocks in technical innovations will help us understand the role of building blocks in the specific case of rule innovation. A scan of history shows that technical innovations almost always arise as a particular combination of well-known building blocks. Take two technological innovations that have revolutionized twentieth-century society, the internal combustion engine and the digital computer. The internal combustion engine combines Volta's sparking device, Venturi's (perfume) sprayer, a water pump's pistons, a mill's gear wheels, and so on. The first digital computers combined Geiger's particle counter, the persistence (slow fade) of cathode ray tube images, the use of wires to direct electrical currents, and so on. In both cases most of the building blocks were already in use, in different contexts, in the nineteenth century. It was the specific combination, among the great number possible, that provided the innovation. When a new building block is discovered, the result is usually a range of innovations. The transistor revolutionized devices ranging from major appliances to portable radios and computers. Even new building blocks are often derived, at least in part, by combining more elementary building blocks. Transistors were founded on knowledge of selenium rectifiers and semiconductors.

One Stanford op-ed in particular was picked up by the national press and inspired a website, Stop the Brain Drain, which protested the flow of talent to Wall Street. The Stanford students wrote, The financial industry’s influence over higher education is deep and multifaceted, including student choice over majors and career tracks, career development resources, faculty and course offerings, and student culture and political activism. In 2010, even after the economic crisis, the financial services industry drew a full 20 percent of Harvard graduates and over 15 percent of Stanford and MIT graduates. This represented the highest portion of any industry except consulting, and about three times more than previous generations. As the financial industry’s profits have increasingly come from complex financial products, like the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that ignited the 2008 financial meltdown, its demand has steadily grown for graduates with technical degrees. In 2006, the securities and commodity exchange sector employed a larger portion of scientists and engineers than semiconductor manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications. The result has been a major reallocation of top talent into financial sector jobs, many of which are “socially useless,” as the chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority put it. This over-allocation reduces the supply of productive entrepreneurs and researchers and damages entrepreneurial capitalism, according to a recent Kauffman Foundation report. Many of these finance jobs contribute to volatile and counter-productive financial speculation. Indeed, Wall Street’s activities are largely dominated by speculative security trading and arbitrage instead of investment in new businesses. In 2010, 63 percent of Goldman Sachs’ revenue came from trading, compared to only 13 percent from corporate finance. Why are graduates flocking to Wall Street? Beyond the simple allure of high salaries, investment banks and hedge funds have designed an aggressive, sophisticated, and well-funded recruitment system, which often takes advantage of [a] student’s job insecurity. Moreover, elite university culture somehow still upholds finance as a “prestigious” and “savvy” career track.6

The world headquarters of Fukai Semiconductor was housed in a mammoth, sprawling building of glass, polished aluminum and native rock that seemed to be a hybrid design between traditfonal Japanese architecture and something off the drawing board of Frank Lloyd Wright, though there was almost nothing Western about the place. Situated along the shore of the bay, the massive structure rose in some places five stories above the water, each level cantilevered at a different angle thirty and sometimes fifty or sixty yards without apparent support. In other places the building was low, and followed the sinuously twisting shoreline as if it had grown out of the rock. About a half-mile north, still along the bay, the end of the main runway was marked by a cluster of hangars, a 747 jetliner with Fukai's stylized seagull emblem painted in blue on the tail, parked in front of one of them.

His order cited "credible evidence" that a takeover "threatens to impair the national security of the US".Qualcomm was already trying to fend off Broadcom's bid.The deal would have created the world's third-largest chipmaker behind Intel and Samsung.It would also have been the biggest takeover the technology koo50 sector had ever seen.The presidential order said: "The proposed takeover of Qualcomm by the Purchaser (Broadcom) is prohibited. and any substantially equivalent merger. acquisition. or takeover. whether effected directly or indirectly. is also prohibited."Crown jewelSome analysts said President Trump's decision was more about competitiveness and winning the race for 5G technology. than security concerns.The sector is in a race to develop chips for the latest 5G wireless technology. and Qualcomm was considered by Broadcom a significant asset in its bid to gain market share.Image captionQualcomm has already showcased 1Gbps mobile internet speeds using a 5G chip"Given the current political climate in the US and other regions around the world. everyone is taking a more conservative view on mergers and acquisitions and protecting their own domains." IDC's Mario Morales. vice president of enabling technologies and semiconductors told the BBC."We are all at the start of a race. and you have 5G as a crown jewel that everyone wants to participate in - and every region is racing towards that." he said."We don't want to hinder someone like Qualcomm so that they can't provide the technology to the vendors that are competing within that space."US investigates Broadcom's Qualcomm bidQualcomm rejects Broadcom takeover bidHuawei's US smartphone deal collapsesSingapore-based Broadcom had been pursuing San Diego-based Qualcomm for about four months.Last week however. Broadcom's hostile takeover bid was put under investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US. a multi-agency led by the US Treasury Department.The US company had rejected approaches from its rival on the grounds that the offer undervalued the business. and also that any takeover would face antitrust hurdles.Earlier this year. Chinese telecoms giant Huawei said it had not been able to strike a deal to sell its new smartphone via a US carrier. widely believed to be AT&T.The US also recently blocked the $1.2bn sale of money transfer firm Moneygram to China's Ant Financial. the digital payments arm of Alibaba.

His fingerprints are all over today’s technologies. Photoelectric cells and lasers, nuclear power and fiber optics, space travel, and even semiconductors all trace back to his theories.

Guzik Technical Enterprises provides test solutions to the disk drive industry, as well as waveform acquisition tools for demanding ATE and OEM applications in avionics, signal intelligence, military electronics, physics, astronomy, semiconductors, and a variety of other disciplines. We provide High-Performance Data Acquisition (DAQ), Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Data Streaming Solutions for demanding Electronic Test and Measurement (ETM), Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) applications.

Long-tail returns have always been difficult to generate, and the VC industry has sometimes been chaotic and subject to the destructive ebbs and flows of investment cycles. History shows, however, that the social benefits of venture capital have been immense. By facilitating the financing of radical new technologies, US venture capitalists have supported a large range of high-tech firms whose products, from semiconductors to recombinant insulin, telecommunications inventions, and search engines, have revolutionized the way we work, love, and produce. While technological change can often disrupt labor markets and increase wage inequality, in the long run, innovation is essential to productivity gains and economic growth. The venture capital industry has been a powerful driver of innovation, helping to sustain economic development and US competitiveness.

Amelio did himself no favors. Rather than adapt to Apple, he seemed to try to get the company to take on his personality. He had surrounded himself with top executives drawn mostly from the semiconductor industry he knew so well, and he was never effective in public situations. Once, while talking to a group at a dinner party that included Larry Ellison, Amelio tried to put his company’s problems in perspective for the other guests. “Apple is a boat,” he said. “There’s a hole in the boat, and it’s taking on water. But there’s also a treasure on board. And the problem is, everyone on board is rowing in different directions, so the boat is just standing still. My job is to get everyone rowing in the same direction.” After Amelio walked away, Ellison turned to the person standing next to him and asked, “But what about the hole?” That was one story Steve never got tired of telling.

When both NMOS and PMOS field-effect transistors are combined in a complementary arrangement, power is used only when the transistors are switching, making dense, low-power circuit designs possible. Because of this, virtually all modern processors are designed using CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) technology.

s s i o n o f R a t i o n a l S o f t w a r e C o r p o r a t i o n i s t o e n s u r e t h e s u c c e s s o f c u s t o m e r s c o n s t r u c t i n g t h e s o f t w a r e s y s t e m s t h a t t h e y d e p e n d o n . We enable our customers to achieve their business objectives by turning software into a source of competitive advantage, speeding time-to-market, reducing the risk of failure, and improving software quality. We fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse. • An integrated family of application construction tools that automate the Rational Approach throughout the software lifecycle. • Technical consulting services delivered by our worldwide field organization of software engineers and technical sales professionals. Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications

o n o f R a t i o n a l S o f t w a r e C o r p o r a t i o n i s t o e n s u r e t h e s u c c e s s o f c u s t o m e r s c o n s t r u c t i n g t h e s o f t w a r e s y s t e m s t h a t t h e y d e p e n d o n . We enable our customers to achieve their business objectives by turning software into a source of competitive advantage, speeding time-to-market, reducing the risk of failure, and improving software quality. We fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse. • An integrated family of application construction tools that automate the Rational Approach throughout the software lifecycle. • Technical consulting services delivered by our worldwide field organization of software engineers and technical sales professionals. Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications, banking and financial services, manufacturing, transportation, aerospace, and defense.They construct software applications for a wide range of platforms, from microprocessors embedded in telephone switching systems to enterprisewide information systems running on company-specific intranets. Rational Software Corporation is traded on the NASDAQ system under the symbol RATL.1

We seem unwilling to allow for the possibility that the glory of our species may lie not only in the launching of satellites, the founding of companies, and the manufacturing of miraculously thin semiconductors but also in an ability—even if it is widely distributed among billions—to spoon yogurt into small mouths, find missing socks, clean toilets, deal with tantrums, and wipe congealed things off tables.

According to Harvard University’s Atlas of Economic Complexity, the key to driving economic growth is not so much individual experts as the combination of expertise required to make complex products: for example, the mix of experience in batteries, liquid crystals, semiconductors, software, metallurgy, and lean manufacturing required to make a smartphone. The fastest way to secure this array of talent is to import it. The same idea applies to more and more fields in an age when even cooking has become culinary science.

The notion that electromagnetic energy exists as discrete packets of energy rather than a continuous stream became the foundation on which physicists erected what is inarguably the most successful (and strangest) theory in the history of science. The laws of quantum physics not only replicate all the successes of the classical theory they supplanted (that is, a quantum calculation produces an answer at least as accurate as a classical one in problems ranging from the fall of an apple to the flight of a spaceship). They also succeed where the laws of classical physics fail. It is quantum physics, not classical physics, that explains the burning of stars, accounts for the structure of elementary particles, predicts the order of elements in the periodic table, and describes the physics of the newborn universe. Although devised to explain atomic and electromagnetic phenomena, quantum physics has “yielded a deep understanding of chemistry and the solid state,” noted the physicist Daniel Greenberger, a leading quantum theorist: quantum physics spawned quantum technologies, including transistors, lasers, semiconductors, light-emitting diodes, scans, PET scans, and MRI machines.

The whole semiconductor industry coordinated around achieving a higher level of integration, based on smaller transistors, about every eighteen months. This rate of progress was called Moore’s law. No one could jump much ahead of this pace because all the technologies, from photolithography to optical design to metal deposition to testing, had to advance in lockstep. The industry called this pattern of collective advance the “road map.

Intel sells more semiconductors in China than it sells in the United States. Boeing sells a quarter of all its planes in China. Apple depends on China for the manufacturing of all its iPhones. Wal-Mart and Home Depot depend on China for a vast array of products.

It was only after World War II that Stanford began to emerge as a center of technical excellence, owing largely to the campaigns of Frederick Terman, dean of the School of Engineering and architect-of-record of the military-industrial-academic complex that is Silicon Valley. During World War II Terman had been tapped by his own mentor, presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush, to run the secret Radio Research Lab at Harvard and was determined to capture a share of the defense funding the federal government was preparing to redirect toward postwar academic research. Within a decade he had succeeded in turning the governor’s stud farm into the Stanford Industrial Park, instituted a lucrative honors cooperative program that provided a camino real for local companies to put selected employees through a master’s degree program, and overseen major investments in the most promising areas of research. Enrollments rose by 20 percent, and over one-third of entering class of 1957 started in the School of Engineering—more than double the national average.4 As he rose from chairman to dean to provost, Terman was unwavering in his belief that engineering formed the heart of a liberal education and labored to erect his famous “steeples of excellence” with strategic appointments in areas such as semiconductors, microwave electronics, and aeronautics. Design, to the extent that it was a recognized field at all, remained on the margins, the province of an older generation of draftsmen and machine builders who were more at home in the shop than the research laboratory—a situation Terman hoped to remedy with a promising new hire from MIT: “The world has heard very little, if anything, of engineering design at Stanford,” he reported to President Wallace Sterling, “but they will be hearing about it in the future.

Leibniz's development of the symbols and theory behind calculus, which allows for the precise study and modeling of change, gave mathematicians a weapon with which to create algorithms powerful enough to build semiconductors, connect us through radio, and launch satellites into orbit with a laser's precision. Calculus and algorithm have intertwined histories, meanings, and power.

Computer support specialists are also known as technical support specialists. We are Technical support specialists investigate and resolve problems in computer. The introduction of semiconductors to computer technology made possible smaller.

If you made a country out of all the companies founded by Stanford alumni, it would have a GDP of roughly $ 2.7 trillion, putting it in the neighborhood of the tenth largest economy in the world. Companies started by Stanford alumni include Google, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, LinkedIn, and E* Trade. Many were started by undergraduates and graduate students while still on campus. Like the cast of Saturday Night Live, the greats who have gone on to massive career success are remembered, but everyone still keeps a watchful eye on the newcomers to see who might be the next big thing. With a $ 17 billion endowment, Stanford has the resources to provide students an incredible education inside the classroom, with accomplished scholars ranging from Nobel Prize winners to former secretaries of state teaching undergraduates. The Silicon Valley ecosystem ensures that students have ample opportunity outside the classroom as well. Mark Zuckerberg gives a guest lecture in the introductory computer science class. Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey spoke on campus to convince students to join his companies. The guest speaker lineups at the myriad entrepreneurship and technology-related classes each quarter rival those of multithousand-dollar business conferences. Even geographically, Stanford is smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. Facebook sits just north of the school. Apple is a little farther south. Google is to the east. And just west, right next to campus, is Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of venture capital.

successfully. ‘Japanese researchers have successfully developed a semiconductor chip made of gallium arsenide’ (Associated Press). It was thoughtful of the writer to tell us that the researchers had not unsuccessfully developed a gallium arsenide chip, but also unnecessary. Delete successfully.

researchers who examined the semiconductor industry found that firms in growing markets were much more successful than firms in mature or emerging markets.

We have in-house quality testing office that urges us to check the likelihood of things under various conditions and using fluctuating contraptions. Industrial Chiller Manufacturer in Coimbatore Our quality masters design the likelihood of things from the key time of creation until the point that the last change with a sole should need to pass on acknowledgment get-together to customers. Our alliance holds accomplishment in get-together and giving of Temperature Control Equipment, Industrial Cooling Systems and Special Purpose Cooling Equipment The things we used find application in various ventures and fulfill the aggregate fundamental of customers. These things find use in plastic industry in imbuement and blow molding, kick the can heaving and machine tooling, metal working cutting oils, welding equipment,chemical managing, vacuum structures, X-bar diffraction, pharmaceutical definition, sustenance and drink building, paper and bond sorting out, control supplies and power age stations, investigative mechanical social occasion, semiconductors, gas cooling and compacted air. We have bleeding edge establishment office that has all the incited machines that help us to make best quality things. We reestablish our machines at standard between times inorder to restore the favored point and quality rate. Each and every something we offer are settled on with choice grungy material and thoroughly take after wide quality checks for precision and sensibility. We have a social unlawful relationship of exceedingly qualified miracles who pass on latest degrees of advance amidst the time spent party these things.

It was only after the Second World War that the US-with its industrial supremacy now unchallenged- liberalized its trade and started championing the cause of free trade. But the US has never practised free trade to the same degree as Britain did during its free trade period (1860 to 1932). It has never had a zero-tariff regime like Britain. It has also been much more aggressive in using non-tariff protectionist measures when necessary. Morever, even when it shifted to freer (if not absolutely free) trade, the US government promoted key industries by another means, namely, public funding of R&D. Between the 1950s and the mid-1990s, US federal government funding accounted for 50-70% of the country's total R&D funding, which is far above the figure of around 20%, found in such 'governemen-led' countries as Japan and Korea. Without federal government funding for R&D, the US would not have been able to maintain its technological lead over the rest of the world in key industries like computers, semiconductors, life sciences, the internet and aerospace.

In the late 1980s, for example, Japan owned 50 percent of the global semiconductor market and produced 80 percent of all SRAM memory chips.

STARTUP THINKING New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This

manera visual de transmitir información a sus clientes, a sus empleados, a sus proveedores y a las entidades de crédito, la información que cada uno de ellos cree necesitar y en la modalidad visual más convincente que sea posible. Una asesoría pequeña cubre las paredes de la recepción con «informes de impacto» (cartas de sus clientes), que cuentan al mundo cómo mejora la empresa. Una tienda de mascotas coloca tarjetas informativas junto a cada jaula, en las que describen los rasgos de las mascotas que contienen, de dónde proceden, si son buenas con los niños y la clase de cuidados que necesitan. Y un taller de automóviles cuenta con una gran ventana que da a la zona de trabajo y por la que los clientes pueden ver a los empleados mientras llevan a cabo sus trabajos especializados con uniformes y material codificado por colores en función de la tarea, mientras los altavoces reproducen un CD que describe lo que se ve. Por supuesto, hay opciones. Tanto si se trata de una carnicería, de una tienda de comestibles, de un concesionario de automóviles, de una planta de semiconductores, de una iglesia o de una tienda Apple, la visualización de la empresa puede reducirse a lo meramente pragmático o llevarse hasta el ideal. Puede ser ordinaria o sublime.

The spread of semiconductors was enabled as much by clever manufacturing techniques as academic physics. Universities like MIT and Stanford played a crucial role in developing knowledge about semiconductors, but the chip industry only took off because graduates of these institutions spent years tweaking production processes to make mass manufacturing possible. It was engineering and intuition, as much as scientific theorizing, that turned a Bell Labs patent into a world-changing industry

New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

the world produced more chips in 2021 than ever before—over 1.1 trillion semiconductor devices, according to research firm IC Insights. This was a 13 percent increase compared to 2020. The semiconductor shortage is mostly a story of demand growth rather than supply issues.

For decades the idea of a solid-state amplifier, an invention badly needed to replace large masses of hot glass in vacuum tubes, was attributed to three physicists working at Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL): in early 1948 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain filed their patent for a germanium point-contact transistor, followed by William Shockley’s application for a junction transistor; the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. But BTL eventually admitted (on its memorial website, now defunct) that it had merely reinvented the transistor, and in 1988, four decades after the BTL patents were issued, Bardeen made it clear that “Lilienfeld had the basic concept of controlling the flow of current in a semiconductor to make an amplifying device” but that many years of theory development and advances in material science were needed to turn his idea into a commercial reality.

Members of Congress would no doubt have been furious had they learned that DARPA—ostensibly a defense agency—was wining and dining professors of computer science as they theorized about chip design. But it was efforts like these that shrank transistors, discovered new uses for semiconductors, drove new customers to buy them, and funded the subsequent generation of smaller transistors. When it came to semiconductor design, no country in the world had a better innovation ecosystem.

staggering. China’s import of chips—$260 billion in 2017, the year of Xi’s Davos debut—was far larger than Saudi Arabia’s export of oil or Germany’s export of cars. China spends more money buying chips each year than the entire global trade in aircraft. No product is more central to international trade than semiconductors.

Newspaper Guangming Ribao set the tone, calling on readers in 1985 to abandon “the formula of ‘the first machine imported, the second machine imported, and the third machine imported’ ” and replace it with “ ‘the first machine imported, the second made in China, and the third machine exported.’ ” This “Made in China” obsession was hardwired into the Communist Party’s worldview, but the country was hopelessly behind in semiconductor technology—something that neither Mao’s mass mobilization nor Deng’s diktat could easily change.

The U.S. wants to reverse its declining share of chip fabrication and retain its dominant position in semiconductor design and machinery. Countries in Europe and Asia, however, would like to grab a bigger share of the high-value chip design market. Taiwan and South Korea, meanwhile, have no plans to surrender their market-leading positions fabricating advanced logic and memory chips. With China viewing expansion of its own fabrication capacity as a national security necessity, there’s a limited amount of future chip fabrication business that can be shared between the U.S., Europe, and Asia. If the U.S. wants to increase its market share, some other country’s market share must decrease. The U.S. is implicitly hoping to grab market share from one of the other areas with modern chipmaking facilities. Yet outside China, all the world’s advanced chip fabs are in countries that are U.S. allies or close friends.

A learning curve—measured as the percentage unit cost reduction realized with each doubling of cumulative production volume—is typically steepest when labor and machinery add significant value in the production process, as with aircraft assembly or semiconductor manufacturing. Value-added refers to the difference between a product’s final cost and the cost of raw material inputs; this difference consists mostly of labor and equipment costs. Learning-by-doing—for example, finding a way to cut setup times for a new production run—often yields labor and equipment cost savings.

Bardeen and Brattain switched on the power and were able to control the current surging across the germanium. Shockley’s theories about semiconductor materials had been proven correct.

new type of transistor, made up of three chunks of semiconductor material.

Shockley Semiconductor in the San Francisco suburb of Mountain View, California, just down the street from Palo Alto,

he thought of assembling multiple components on the same piece of semiconductor

Most of the world’s GDP is produced with devices that rely on semiconductors. For a product that didn’t exist seventy-five years ago, this is an extraordinary

Soviet spies were among the best in the business, but the semiconductor production process required more details and knowledge than even the most capable agent could steal.

Around a quarter of the chip industry’s revenue comes from phones; much of the price of a new phone pays for the semiconductors inside. For the past decade, each generation of iPhone has been powered by one of the world’s most advanced processor chips. In total, it takes over a dozen semiconductors to make a smartphone work, with different chips managing the battery, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular network connections, audio, the camera, and more.

Fabricating and miniaturizing semiconductors has been the greatest engineering challenge of our time. Today, no firm fabricates chips with more precision than the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC.

Sony’s expertise wasn’t in designing chips but devising consumer products and customizing the electronics they needed. Calculators were another consumer device transformed by Japanese firms. Pat Haggerty, the TI Chairman, had asked Jack Kilby to build a handheld, semiconductor-powered calculator in 1967. However, TI’s marketing department didn’t think there’d be a market for a cheap, handheld calculator, so the project stagnated. Japan’s Sharp Electronics disagreed, putting California-produced chips in a calculator that was far simpler and cheaper than anyone had thought possible.

the world produced more chips in 2021 than ever before—over 1.1 trillion semiconductor devices, according to research firm IC Insights. This was a 13 percent increase compared to 2020. The semiconductor shortage is mostly a story of demand growth rather than supply issues. It’s driven by new PCs, 5G phones, AI-enabled data centers—and, ultimately, our insatiable demand for computing power.

China had driven U.S. solar panel manufacturing out of business. Couldn’t it do the same in semiconductors? “This

Semiconductors weren’t simply the “cornerstone” of “everything we’re competing on,” as one administration official had put it. They could also be a devastatingly powerful weapon.

Intel squandered its lead, missing major shifts in semiconductor architecture needed for artificial intelligence, then bungling its manufacturing processes and failing to keep up with Moore’s Law.

TSMC had only a single value proposition—effective manufacturing—its leadership focused relentlessly on fabricating ever-more-advanced semiconductors

China’s import of chips—$260 billion in 2017, the year of Xi’s Davos debut—was far larger than Saudi Arabia’s export of oil or Germany’s export of cars. China spends more money buying chips each year than the entire global trade in aircraft. No product is more central to international trade than semiconductors.

Real men” might have fabs, but Silicon Valley’s new wave of semiconductor entrepreneurs didn’t.

the entire computer age—including every semiconductor, starting with the very first transistor, built in 1947—has rested on well-modeled quantum behavior and reliable quantum equations.

At the same time, many of the pioneering venture capitalists were not moneymen but graduates of the semiconductor industry. One of the eight men who had formed Fairchild Semiconductor, Eugene Kleiner, would found the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 1972, not coincidentally the year after the Intel IPO. In the same year, Don Valentine, a former Fairchild sales executive, founded Sequoia Capital. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia would become as intrinsic to Silicon Valley as the entrepreneurs themselves—the equivalent of the grand Hollywood studios, with the entrepreneurs analogous to actors, directors, and producers. Over the next forty-five years, several of America’s most valuable corporations, including three of the top four, would be funded early on by Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia or both. This birth of venture capital—a rebirth, really—was a return to the most American of roots, older than its founders’ democracy. The organizers of the Virginia Company had called upon “adventurers” to risk capital. A few years later, the Merchant Adventurers in London coffeehouses had agreed to finance the voyage of a large molasses ship known as the Mayflower. Three hundred fifty years later, an improved concept of venture capital was being applied to the next era of American discovery.

There’s no better case study showing how connectivity and computing power will turn old products into digitized machines than Tesla, Elon Musk’s auto company. Tesla’s cult following and soaring stock price have attracted plenty of attention, but what’s less noticed is that Tesla is also a leading chip designer. The company hired star semiconductor designers like Jim Keller to build a chip specialized for its automated driving needs, which is fabricated using leading-edge technology. As early as 2014, some analysts were noting that Tesla cars “resemble a smartphone.” The company has been often compared to Apple, which also designs its own semiconductors. Like Apple’s products, Tesla’s finely tuned user experience and its seemingly effortless integration of advanced computing into a twentieth-century product—a car—are only possible because of custom-designed chips. Cars have incorporated simple chips since the 1970s. However, the spread of electric vehicles, which require specialized semiconductors to manage the power supply, coupled with increased demand for autonomous driving features foretells that the number and cost of chips in a typical car will increase substantially.