“Chip War” begins by transporting readers back to the era of World War II, a time that was not only a defining moment in human history but also a catalyst for technological advancement. The war was characterized by industrial attrition, with the United States’ production of tanks, ships, and planes outpacing all the Axis powers combined. The experiences of individuals such as Akio Morita in Japan, Morris Chang in China, and Andy Grove in Hungary, each illustrate the unique challenges faced during the war. These personal narratives provide a human perspective to the broader historical events, enriching our understanding of the era.
As the war drew to a close in 1945, speculation was rife about the dawn of a new Atomic Age, one defined by cutting-edge technologies such as rockets and radars. This speculation was fueled in part by the rapid advancements in computing power that took place during the war. Before computers were invented, humans relied on abacuses and mechanical calculators for calculations. However, this was a slow process that required considerable effort. The need for faster and more capable computing power during the war drove investment in the development of mechanical computers, which accelerated the field significantly.
During the Great Depression, a group of human computers was employed by the Works Progress Administration to perform complex calculations. However, even before the war, investment was flowing into projects to produce more capable mechanical computers, which were seen as a key tool for solving complex problems. One such example was the creation of mechanical bombsights, which were used to help aviators hit their targets. However, these devices had limited accuracy due to the fact that they only processed a limited number of inputs to produce a single output.
With the advent of electrical charges, early electric computers were able to perform a much wider range of calculations. This was made possible by the use of binary counting systems and vacuum tubes, which could be programmed to switch connections between them, enabling reprogramming capability. However, vacuum tube technology was too cumbersome, slow, and unreliable to be widely adopted. The ENIAC computer, for example, took up an entire room, but only multiplied hundreds of numbers per second faster than any mathematician, making it useful for niche applications like code breaking.
The second chapter introduces readers to William Shockley, a renowned physicist and theoretical physicist known for his groundbreaking work in semiconductors. Born in London to a mining engineer, Shockley grew up in Palo Alto, California. He received a degree from Caltech and went on to earn a PhD in physics from MIT. He worked at Bell Labs, one of the most influential centers of science and engineering at the time, and specialized in semiconductors, a class of materials that conduct current when certain materials are added and an electric field is applied.
Despite his obnoxious behavior, Shockley was considered a brilliant physicist. In 1945, he theorized a “solid state valve” that would function as a valve opening and closing the flow of electrons. Despite his intuition and expertise, the electrical properties of semiconductors remained mysterious and unexplained until the late 1940s. Two of Shockley’s colleagues, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, proved his theories correct by building a device that applied gold filaments to a block of germanium. This device, named the “transistor,” was useful for amplifying signals in phones and other devices, replacing vacuum tubes.
Shockley was angry and locked himself in a hotel room to create a new type of transistor, made up of three chunks of semiconductor material that could also act as a switch. Bell Labs held a press conference in June 1948 to announce their invention, but it wasn’t well received by the media. Despite this setback, Shockley went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics for his workon the transistor.
The third chapter of “Chip Wars” delves into the challenges of mass-producing the transistor and the subsequent establishment of Shockley Semiconductor. The transistor market was uncertain, and it was unclear whether transistors would take off as they needed to either perform better than vacuum tubes or be produced at a lower cost. Shockley established his company with the aim of building the best transistors and licensing the technology from AT&T.
The complexity of the wiring between thousands of transistors in computers was a challenge, but Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments was trying to simplify it. Kilby was a brilliant and soft-spoken engineer who was one of the first outside of Bell Labs to use a transistor. Texas Instruments was originally founded to produce equipment using seismic waves for oil drilling but after World War II, they hired engineers to build military systems. Kilby arrived in Dallas during the company’s July holiday period and had time to tinker in the lab. He came up with the idea of assembling multiple components on the same piece of semiconductor material, resulting in the invention of the integrated circuit or chip.
Eight engineers from William Shockley’s semiconductor lab quit and founded their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor. These engineers, also known as the “traitorous eight,” are widely credited with founding Silicon Valley. Bob Noyce, the leader of the group, had a visionary enthusiasm for microelectronics. By the time Fairchild was founded, the science of transistors was clear, but manufacturing them reliably was still a challenge.
Jean Hoerni developed a method of fabricating all parts of a transistor by depositing a protective silicon dioxide layer on a slab of silicon, avoiding exposure to impurities and air. Robert Noyce realized Hoerni’s “planar method” could be used to produce multiple transistors on the same silicon chip, using lines of metal to conduct electricity between the transistors. Noyce’s version of the integrated circuit had no freestanding wires and was built into a single block of material.
Noyce and Gordon Moore realized that miniaturization and electric efficiency were a powerful combination. Noyce’s integrated circuit was vastly more reliable and easier to miniaturize than the mesa transistor, but initially, it cost 50 times more to make. Although Noyce’s invention was brilliant, it needed a market to be successful. The development of the transistor and the integrated circuit was a crucial turning point in the history of electronics, leading to the creation of modern-day computing and communication devices.
