Chip War by Chris Miller Flashcards
What is Moore’s Law?
the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years
What was one way that the government tried to employ people in the Great Depression, involving calculations?
- The Mathematical Tables Project
- Several hundred “computers”, sitting in Manhattan office, tabulating logarithms and exponential functions
- Produced 28 volumes, each book filled with tables of numbers
American bombers in WW2 used mechanical computational devices, but they were not that accurate - only […] of bombs landed within 1,000 feet of their target.
20%
What’s a semi-conductor?
Not like copper - electricity CAN flow
Not like glass - CAN’T flow
But like silicon - CAN’T flow, but if DOPED with e.g. boron or phosphorous then current CAN flow
When / where / by whom was the transistor invented?
Bell Labs, New Jersey
1947-48
William Shockley, Walter Brattain, John Bardeen
What are 3 parts of a transistor?
Collector
Base
Emittor
What was the first transistor company?
Shockley Semiconductor (1955)
What company was set up by eight engineers who left Shockley?
Fairchild Semiconductor
Name three people from the “traitorous eight” who set up Fairchild
Gordon Moore - Moore’s Law
Euegen Kleiner - Kleiner Perkins
Bob Noyce - pioneer of the integrated circuit
Building multiple transistors on one piece of silicon (a chip) was invented by whom?
Jack Kilby, 1958, Texas Instruments
Who was Fairchild’s first big customer?
NASA (MIT Instruments Lab) for their Apollo 11 mission to put a man on the moon
Who was Texas Instrument’s first big integrated circuit customer?
US Airforce
Designing Minuteman II missiles to hit Soviet Union
What did Jay Lathrop discover and patent in 1957?
Photolithography - printing by light
Turned microscope the other way, placed mask with design of circuit over it, on slad of silicon he added photo-resist that would react to light, and could then be washed away with chemicals
Who else arrived to TI the same year as Jay Lathrop?
Morris Chang
“He sat there and puffed on his pipe and looked at you through the smoke.” The Texans who worked for him thought he was “like a Buddha.”
Who is this?
Morris Chang
Who joined Fairchild in 1962 and went on to build the semiconductor industry?
Andy Grove
What was the first consumer integrated circuit used in?
Zenith hearing aid
What was Bob Noyce’s business strategy to help grow the semi-conductor business?
Slashing prices
Sometimes below cost
“Moore later argued that Noyce’s price cuts were as big an innovation as the technology inside Fairchild’s integrated circuits.”
Why did employees end up leaving Fairchild?
VC funder didn’t want to give them stock options, considered it a form of “creeping socialism”
When was the Sputnik launched?
1957
Descibe the Russian system of creating chips in the 60’s? (two words)
Copy it!
(i.e. American designs, rather than innovating new ideas)
Who set up Sony?
Akio Morita with Masaru Ibuka
In 1946
What was Sony’s first product?
electric rice cooker
What was Sony’s first successful product?
Transistor radio
(TI had previously tried but got the pricing and marketing wrong)
What was Sharp’s initial product success?
The calulator
Most calculators in the 1970’s were Japanese made
What was the US’s approach towards Japan’s electronic trade?
- It was encouraged
- “A people with their history won’t be content to make transistor radios”, said Nixon
- Part of cold war strategy to form deep symbiosis between the countries
- Japanese products were allowed to be sold in the US
- Texas Instruments opened a chip fab in Japan
Who led the factory push for Fairchild?
Charlie Sporck
To keep costs down what did Sporck at Fairchild do?
Opened plants in Asia, in Hong Kong in 1963
Chips were made in USA and assembled in Asia
Wages were a tenth of US
Who was the long time leader of Singapore?
Lee Kuan Yew
Who invented the concept of a Silicon Valley startup
Stanford grads Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, when they began tinkering with electronic equipment in a Palo Alto garage in the 1930s
What did Japan do better than the US in the 70’s? In chips
Not only cheaper but higher quality chips (less malfunctions)
Innovations in consumer products such as the Sony Walkman (1979, sold 385m units - one of best consumer products ever)
Who founded AMD and when?
Jerry Sanders (ex Fairchild)
in 1969
What “unfair” advantages did Japan have to build up their semiconductor business?
Corporate espionage (e.g. the trap laid by FBI for executives of Hitachi to access US companies and take pictures)
Barriers to US companies selling chips in Japan e.g. quotas up till 1974
Government subsidies
Much cheaper capital (6-7% vs. ~20% in the early 80s). Japan culture of personal savings gave banks lots of cash to lend even to low/no profit companies
Which US lithography equipment company was leading in the 1980s but then lost out to Nikon and went into decline?
GCA run by Milt Greenberg
When did Japan overtake the US in silicon?
1986 - Japan was producing more chips
By end of 1980’s Japan was supplying 70% of the world’s lithography equipment
How did the US strategically help Japan set up its high tech manufacture?
Japan military spending capped at 1% of GDP (vs. US at 5-10 times more than that)
Left Japan free to invest in building its high tech economy whilst USA carried the military tab of defending it
Who said: “Potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference? … They’re all chips. A hundred dollars of one or a hundred dollars of the other is still a hundred.”
A Reagan-administration economist
How did the US try to fight back and save its semiconductor business in the 80s?
- Creating lobby group to put pressure on Washington
- Reducing capital gain tax and allowing pension funds to invest in VC firms - made capital avialable
- Removal of tariffs to sell to Japan (didn’t do anything)
- 1986 - deal with Japan to put quota on amount they could sell to US
- Sematech to help with collaboration between firms
All in all these didn’t have a significant difference. GCA (lithography maker went bust in 1993)
“The United States has been busy creating lawyers,” while Japan has “been busier creating engineers.” who said this?
Akio Morita
What company did Joe and Ward Parkinson set up in 1978? and why was it a bad time?
Micron
Building DRAM
In Boise, Idaho (state to the South East of Washington state)
Terrible time for US semiconductor industry; was being beaten on price and quality from Asia; many firms facing bankruptcies
How did Mircon manage to compete in DRAM (against the Japanese)?
Ruthless cost-cutting
Every step of the manufacturing process was twekaed
Cheap land and electricity in Idaho
Who was the main backer of Micron?
Jack Simplot - Spud King
$1m turned into $1bn stake
When was the modern personal computer launched?
1981
IBM launches computer, monitor, keyboard, printer, two diskette drives
for $1,565
What pivot did Intel make in 1985?
Exiting DRAM
Getting into microprocessors for PCs
How did Japan suffer in the late 80s vs. US chip players? Think macro economics
Yen doubled vs dollar making Japanse imports expensive
US interest rates went down reducing cost of capital
What did other players do in reaction to IBM’s launch of personal computer in the 80s?
They copied. Using Intel chips and Windows OS - installed in every office an many homes.
For example Compaq (based in Texas)
When was the Korean War?
1950-53
What did Lee Byung-Chul found in 1938 by selling dried fish and vegetables to China?
The Samsung empire
By 1960 he had become richest man in South Korea
“My enemies enemy is my friend” - which country did Silicon Valley use in the 80’s to set up a rival (DRAM) producer to Japan?
South Korea
(e.g. Samsung making chips under the Intel name, and Micron licensing technology)
What did Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Virtebi set up in 1985?
QualComm
They focused on using chips for radio waves
Now they could use algorithms, more potential to encode/decode information using this medium
Initially used for military satellites, branches out into late 80s into civiliian uses (like satellites for trucking industry)
What two type of bomb were used in the war against Iraq in 1991?
Paveway (circuits designed by Texas Instruments, early version in 1972)
Tomahawk
