Items related to Microchip: An Idea, Its Genesis, and the Revolution...
Synopsis
"Computer chips are an almost invisible part of our modern lives, and yet they make much of what's "modern" in them possible. Even the tech-averse among us depend on their hidden capabilities. From DVDs, medical scanners, and today's fuel-efficient automobiles, to space travel, cable television, and those annoying musical greeting cards, microelectronics have come to define the information age." "How did this revolutionary technology emerge, and how did it happen so quickly? In Microchip, Jeffrey Zygmont draws on extensive research and countless interviews with seminal engineers to trace the fascinating story of the chip through four decades of invention, improvement, and, ultimately, proliferation." "This story begins with the ambitious (and later Nobel-prize winning) Jack Kilby, on his way to a new and more promising job at Texas Instruments. Knowing that circuits had to be smaller, faster, and cheaper in order to manage more complex calculations, Kilby came up with a brilliant idea: to integrate all the circuit's parts inside a solid chip, thereby paving the way for more miniature electronics. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, the same idea occurred almost simultaneously to Bob Noyce, later to become famous as a founder of Intel. The ensuing patent battle unleashed a competitive, cutthroat race to develop next-generation chips, as companies realized that to stay afloat, they had to set the pace of innovation. Stragglers wouldn't survive." From that fateful year of 1958 to the present, Zygmont follows the evolution of the chip - as much a human story as a technological one. In the process, he gives us unprecedented access to luminaries like Gordon Moore, of Moore's law fame; An Wang of the Wang Word Processing System; Patrick Haggerty, a technological visionary who directed Texas Instruments to use integrated circuits in a calculator; and lesser known innovators like Jean Hoerni, the inventor of the planar transistor; Nobel prize-winning "Bulldog" Bill Shockley;
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About the Author
Jeffrey Zygmont is a business writer who specializes in high-tech topics. He has written for BusinessWeek, Boston Magazine, Inc., and CFO and has been a staff writer for High Technology and a columnist for Omni. He lives in Salem, New Hampshire.
From Booklist
Zygmont compares the invention of the integrated circuit to that of steel--something we use constantly in our day-to-day lives yet rarely stop to contemplate. When it was first invented, the microchip, really an extremely dense packet of transistors, had few fans. There was great resistance to its introduction in the early 1960s, as circuit makers were content with wiring their own rather than using the ready-made ICs. It took not only the ability to create a circuit on a fleck of silicon, but also the vision to find applications for it, first in hand-held calculators, then microwave oven controllers, then cell phones and automobiles, and finally in computers. This is the story of the visionaries who brought us this incredibly complex technology that we take for granted today, such as Jack Kirby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce and Ted Hoff of Intel, as well as some of the unsung heroes of the field. Zygmont succeeds in demystifying the strange processes involved in creating these microscopic circuits and connects us back to what will soon be considered another era. David Siegfried
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