Chip War

02Making a new chip is tough, but selling it is even tougher

The story of how chips, or integrated circuits, came to be is a captivating one that kicked off in the middle of the 20th century. As the world got more complicated and the need for high-level calculations grew, the brainiacs of the time were given the job of finding quicker, more efficient ways to crunch numbers. The computers back then were big, slow, and in desperate need of an upgrade. The answer to this problem was found in semiconductors, special materials like silicon and germanium. Usually, these materials aren't great at conducting electricity. But, when you mix in certain elements like phosphorus and zap them with an electric field, they start to conduct electricity. This strange behavior had engineers scratching their heads at first, but then in 1948, an American physicist named William Shockley figured out how to control it. He made a gadget with three layers of semiconductors, and by tweaking the middle layer, he could turn the electric current on and off. This was the start of the transistor, which began to take the place of the big, clunky vacuum tubes in computers. But the real game-changer was the development of integrated circuits. In the late 1950s, two engineers, Jack Kilby from Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce from Fairchild Semiconductor, came up with integrated circuits independently. Instead of using separate parts for each transistor, they built multiple transistors into a single piece of silicon or germanium. Noyce and seven of his buddies, who had quit their jobs at Shockley's lab, started Fairchild Semiconductor. This group is often called the "traitorous eight" and are considered the founders of Silicon Valley. But inventing the integrated circuit was only half the job. The other half was finding people to buy these chips. At first, integrated circuits were too expensive for most people. The first big buyers were the military and space programs, who were in a race with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, it scared the American government into investing a lot of money in advanced technology, including integrated circuits. These chips became key parts in all sorts of military projects, from guiding missiles to landing Apollo 11 on the moon. But the engineers who made these chips had bigger dreams. They wanted to sell their chips to everyone. The big breakthrough came when a scientist named Jay Lathrop patented a process called photolithography. This technique uses light to make small, detailed patterns in a material, which made it possible to make smaller, cheaper chips. As government funding started to dry up, companies were able to start selling to the general public, where the demand for computers was growing fast. This was the start of the personal computer era and the digital revolution that's still going on today.

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