EDITOR'S PAGE

Return of The Chip

In the mid-1980s, few people owned or used personal computers, let alone had access to the Internet and email. Cellphones weren't for sale, and personal assistants were still human, not digital. Music CDs were just starting to replace vinyl LPs, videotapes were coming on strong (remember Betamax?) but DVDs were well over a decade off. Slick fax machines zipped pages off at a rate of a few per minute, and handheld calculators were still "cool." Microchips were already careening toward pervasiveness, but the revolutionary changes seen since then have eclipsed all but the most prescient visionaries' expectations. Meanwhile, those enjoying the early products that the chip made possible were almost completely unaware of those magical slices of silicon.

So it's no surprise that a well-reviewed book published in 1985, which chronicled the lives of the two American inventors of the integrated circuit, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, and the world-changing technology they set in motion, didn't do well at the cash registers (which were, after all, still mostly mechanical then). It's also not surprising that the same book, recently revised and reissued by Random House, is selling many more copies this time. Like much microchip-enabled gizmology, T. R. Reid's The Chip was a bit ahead of its time.

A colleague sent us a copy of the new edition a few weeks back, and I eagerly devoured it. I missed it the first time around, since it was out of print and difficult to find by the time I became aware of it. The Chip is by far the most readable of the few general-interest books on the beginnings of the semiconductor industry. Reid starts off with a broad-brush overview of "the monolithic idea" envisioned by Kilby, Noyce, and others. This concept, meant to eradicate the "tyranny of numbers" shackling transistor development, posits "a single block of semiconductor materials containing all the components and all the interconnections of the most complex circuit designs." While this idea underpins almost all chip designs today, it was radical stuff in 1958-59.

Reid then reviews some of the scientific breakthroughs leading to the birth of the IC. The author gives some play to Thomas Edison's invention of the lightbulb (a vacuum tube, after all), J.J. Thomson's discovery of the electron, and other related scientific advancements, then charts the course to the creation of the solid-state transistor by William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen. He proceeds with background on Kilby and Noyce, their respective paths to inventive enlightenment at Texas Instruments and Fairchild, the patent battles, and the first IC apps (mostly military and space) in the 1960s. He continues with the story of Noyce, Gordon Moore, and others bolting Fairchild to create Intel; Kilby's role in inventing the calculator; the go-go days of the U.S. industry in the early 1970s and its subsequent decline later in the decade; and the rise of the Japanese chipmakers.

That's where the first edition left off, so I contacted Reid for some comments on the new version. You may know Reid's voice from his wry cultural observations about the Japanese and English on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." For those living in the Beltway, he may be familiar through his work as a Washington Post correspondent for the paper's Tokyo and London bureaus.

Reid told me via email that "the new edition is about 30% new material....I took the story of the two inventors forward--Noyce to his death, Kilby to the Nobel Prize in late 2000.... I had such a good time writing about Kilby and his totally Kilbyesque response to the Nobel Prize that I was laughing out loud with pleasure when I wrote the revised last chapter.

"The most interesting revision was the chapter on international trade. When I finished the first edition, the chapter ended with the U.S. losing its No. 1 position in world semiconductor market share to the Japanese. But in the new edition, the chapter continues with the story of how the U.S. industry fought back. And now at the end of the chapter, the U.S. is No. 1 again. A lot of the credit goes to Bob Noyce."

Reid explains in the author's note at the end of the book that the second edition "is another effort to suggest that these two men [Kilby and Noyce] are modern heroes who should be admired and emulated around the world." For those in the chipmaking community, no one stands taller in our pantheon of heroes than Jack and Bob.

Tom Cheyney
Editor
tom.cheyney@cancom.com

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