A Brief History of the Semiconductor Industry (original) (raw)
Related papers
Four entrants into the early semiconductor industry-Sprague Electric, Motorola, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories, and Fairchild Semiconductor-displayed remarkably different performance and behavior. Case studies of the firms demonstrate that the key differences stemmed from the firms' technological goals and activities and their abilities to integrate R&D and manufacturing. These differences can in turn be related to the firms' origins and their different conditions upon entry into the semiconductor industry, which had lasting effects due to constraints on change. While the cases offer limited prescriptions for management, they underscore the importance of technological diversity for an industry's rate of technical advance and, in turn, public policies that support such diversity.
The transistor: an invention becomes a big business
Proceedings of the IEEE, 1998
This paper sets about to examine the birth and critical milestones of this phenomenal, world-changing industry. Starting immediately after the Second World War, Bell Laboratories' management established a group to investigate semiconductors with a view to their application in telephone equipment. The group, headed by W. Shockley and including J. Bardeen and W. Brattain, was fully in place by January 1946. By December of the following year, Brattain and Bardeen had discovered the point-contact transistor. Early in the following year, Shockley established his theory of minority carrier injection and predicted the operation of the junction transistor. This paper outlines the growth of this business, starting initially among vacuum-tube manufacturers and spreading to high-growth-rate startups and on to major international companies. The importance of the U.S. military and space programs in the critical early days of both the transistor and the integrated circuit are touched on briefly. This paper gives careful attention to the birth and current state of the semiconductor scene of the Asian countries of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.
The evolution of competitive advantage in the worldwide semiconductor industry, 1947-1996
1999
The voluminous literature generated from the rise of foreignespecially Japanese-competition in semiconductors seemed to have one dominant theme: the United States must not merely learn from but closely imitate Japan. Most analysts assured us, implicitly or explicitly, that Japanese success reflected inherent superiorities in industrial structure and state policy, superiorities of a widely applicable and lasting kind. In its strongest form, the lesson from Japan was read in terms of the inevitable eclipse of the structures of entrepreneurial capitalism by some form of systematic planning, usually of the corporatist or state-corporatist variety? A weaker variant simply indicted the~iguLSemiconr:..indus~d its dom.~_~ti.csuppliers•forexceS&i~ragmentation" and vertical disintegration. Writers like Ferguson (1988) and Florida and Kenney (1990) suggested that American faith in industrial districts like Silicon Valley had been misplaced and that only imitating the Japanese keiretsu structure would improve the performance of the American industry. This view was echoed by the prestigious MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity, which declared in 1989 that "the traditional structure and institutions of the U.S. industry appear to be inappropriate for meeting the challenge of the much stronger and better-organized Japanese competition" (MIT Commission, 1989, vol. 2, p. 20). The commission pronounced the American merchant semiconductor industry "too fragmented" and called for consolidation and rationalization. This chapter offers a different, and perhaps even iconoclastic, explanation for the rise, decline, and resurrection of the American semiconductor industry. We argue that industrial leadership is a historydependent process in which success rests upon the fit between exogenous (or quasi-exogenous) factors and the structures of knowledge, organization, and capability inherited from the past.' There is no one "optimal" industrial structure or policy regime indepencIeiifonlin:~:-,gld circum-sta~:"In-ou;:siory, Japanese success in the 1980s-like American leadership early on and like the renewed American success today-is a matter not of universal and time-invariant superiorities but of a complex of contingent factors and circumstances. There are certainly lessons from the Japanese success. But those lessons must be read carefully and in the proper context. 2 Corporatism. the coordination of control by an oligarchy of industrial interests, is the underlying hypothesis in Fallows (1994); state corporatism, corporatism under state direction, is the fundamental position of Johnson (1982). All of the studies that view Japanese industrial structure in terms of strongly unified purpose and relatively smooth coordination make the implicit argument that this structure for control is, or tends to be, inherently superior to the more divided and contentious structures prevailing in the United States. 3 This theme is developed in greater detail and generality in Langlois and Robertson (1995), especially chapters 6 and 7. 20 R.N. LANGLOIS AND W.E. STEINMUELLER 9 Indeed, Bell's haste in announcing the transistor was motivated at least in part by a desire to preempt any thought the military might have of classifying the technology (Levin, 1982, p. 58). 23 15 The U.S. consumer market for transistors was dominated by portable radio applications.Non-portable radios continued to be produced with vacuum tubes. 16 Examples include R&D contracts to Bell (Levin, 1982, p. 67) and Army Signal Corps R&D and pilot manufacturing line contracts with Western Electric, GE, Raytheon, RCA, and Sylvania (Kraus, 1971). 17 In that same year, the Signal Corps committed 14milliontofund"productionrefinement"at12firmsandproceededtospendatotalofabout14 million to fund "production refinement" at 12 firms and proceeded to spend a total of about 14milliontofund"productionrefinement"at12firmsandproceededtospendatotalofabout50 million on support for production engineering measures (PEM) between 1952 and 1964.
Pre-1900 Semiconductor Research and Semiconductor Device Applications
This paper presents a critique of the origin of semiconductors and pre 1900 developments in semiconductor research and device applications. Although the history of semiconductors stretches back to a time as far as 1833, semiconductors made debut in engineering field by dint of Bose's research in the 1890s. Selenium photoelectric cell, Braun's discovery of rectification at metal semiconductor interface and Bose's introductory applications of semiconductors for wireless engineering can be considered the milestones of the 19 th century in this regard. The author puts forward a suggestion to identify Bose's pioneering research with semiconductor, which led to the development of semiconductor detectors of wireless signals and which is otherwise less pronounced, as an IEEE Milestone.
MY ROAD TO SEMICONDUCTOR RESEARCH
"Evolutionary Progress in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics", 2023
Lu, Toh-Ming (2023). My road to semiconductor research. In: "Evolutionary Progress in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics", Wang, Lawrence K. and Tsao, Hung-ping (Editors). Volume 5, Number 8A, 5(8A), August 1, 2023, 33 pages. Lenox Institute Press, Auburndale, Massachusetts, USA. Lenox.Institute@gmail.com; lut@rpi.edu. https://doi.org/10.17613/71gt-h283 ...... ABSTRACT: This electronic book is a memoir recalling how I entered semiconductor research and how I got involved in the US semiconductor research consortium called “Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)”. In the late 1990’s I became the director of “Center for Advanced Interconnect Science and Technology” funded by SRC. The Center involved 15 universities, 30 faculty, and 40 graduate students doing advanced interconnect research. SRC member companies include Intel, IBM, AMD, TI, UMC (Taiwan), Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing (Singapore). The Center produced over 100 PhD students who later played leadership roles in semiconductor industry. In 2004, Novellus Systems, a major semiconductor manufacturing equipment company, donated a Cu deposition system to Fudan University in anticipation of future business in China. The company organized a workshop in Shanghai. I highlighted some of the activities. I also described some international students graduated from my group, in particular, the interesting and unusual educational and career paths of some Chinese graduate students, who eventually served semiconductor industry. Some future possibilities beyond the current Si technology are also briefly discussed. ...... KEYWORDS: vacuum tubes, semiconductor transistors, integrated circuits, interconnect, Semiconductor Research Corporation, Novellus Systems, beyond Si technology, quantum physics, quantum computing. ...... ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: I thank Professor Jian Shi for valuable discussions on future computing strategies.
Sites of Innovation in Electrical Technology, 1880-1914
Annales historiques de l’électricité, 2004
Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Victoires éditions. © Victoires éditions. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.