How Semiconductors Were Made in America

jjohncole 2 days ago 23 commentsRead Article on siliconimist.com

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itishappy•12 minutes ago

    Hurdle 1: Shoddy Logic       <- Freedom of Speech
    Hurdle 2: Tyranny of Numbers <- Irreverence
    Hurdle 3: Miniaturization    <- Pragmatic not Dogmatic
    Hurdle 4: Repeatability      <- Meritocracy
    Hurdle 5: Scale              <- Outsiders Welcome

Connections suggested without supporting info. I don't buy them. Maybe there's more info in the video, but the terrible AI intro (one of the worst I've seen) did not encourage confidence.

Watched some of the video. The connection between "freedom of speech" and "shoddy logic" is that Shockley invented the transistor despite being a raging racist. This was the best supported argument of the bunch.

It's an interesting point about that time in history, but I still don't buy the argument. Does it hold up when looking at which countries lead the world in semiconductor manufacturing today?

hgoel•about 2 hours ago

It's genuinely so ridiculous to suggest that freedom and meritocracy (among other things) were why America was able to do this first. This stuff was before the civil rights act.

There are endless stories about Americans being sent to Europe needing to be told that they can't treat black people the way they do at home.

All of the chest thumping about being the land of the free rings hollow when considering how recent some of this history is. The current and previous president were alive when the civil rights act was passed!

LinuxAmbulance•about 4 hours ago

The bit about how semiconductors could only have been made in America because only America had the specific combination of freedom of speech, irreverence, pragmatism over dogmatism, meritocracy and welcoming outsiders is definitely an interesting idea, although how true that is?

KK7NIL•about 2 hours ago

Considering two Germans in Paris independently discovered the transistor just a few months after Shockley's team, this seems like a self-serving fantasy: https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/the-european-t...

There's no question in my mind that American industry and capital markets were far better at pivoting to this new industry though.

amelius•about 1 hour ago

If you have a diode, then the transistor is only a small step away.

Semiconductor physics books require you to work through a lot of material until you understand the diode, and then the bipolar transistor is just one next chapter.

boelboel•about 2 hours ago

America was very much against immigrants between about 1925 and 1965. If you look at the history of the US they needed immigrants to settle the land, before their expansion westward they were quite against immigration.

petcat•about 2 hours ago

> America was very much against immigrants between about 1925 and 1965.

And still despite immigration reforms and national origin quotas, USA still accepted by far more immigrants during this time period than any other country.

boelboel•about 1 hour ago

Per capita far from (Australia and Canada, Israel, France, Taiwan, Switzerland , Belgium, Argentina...) on an absolute number sure because they were the most populous industrialized country. Even the latter you could argue against as west Germany had many after WW2 move from all over 'back to' Germany.

contingencies•about 3 hours ago

Not very. The missing macro is that during and after WWII, the US had the luxury of being the only intact industrial economy.

In this environment, Shockley, who himself was the child of an engineer and has been criticized as a eugenicist (ie. explicitly not welcoming outsiders, despite his father speaking eight languages, and being born in London), ran a Bell research lab and was exposed to a plurality of emergent military problems to which he applied physics.

After the war, and co-inventing the transistor (probably largely in response to this wartime experience), some of his ex employees including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore split off and started research under Fairchild.

Notably, this occurred right when chemistry was having its moment, and the US had huge postwar capacity to enable innovation. While total industrial production reached 247% of prewar levels during WWII, chemical production soared to 412%.

The group succeeded in 1960. Of the eight who left to found this novel research group, only two were immigrants. Six were educated at elite US universities like Caltech, MIT and Stanford.

StableAlkyne•about 1 hour ago

> The missing macro is that during and after WWII, the US had the luxury of being the only intact industrial economy.

While true, this is generally overemphasized. The destruction of industry in other countries helped the postwar US, but the US didn't need that help to begin with to achieve an absurd lead over everyone else.

If we look at 1938, the US still has a higher GDP than Germany and the USSR (#2 and #3) combined. This is just before the war, so everyone has had over 20 years to recover, and they hadn't started bombing each other yet.

Stats based on: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334182/wwii-pre-war-gdp...

The US is massive, has cheap undeveloped land, natural resources, and easy transit (you have a massive river running down the center for barges, along with lots of flat runs for railroads). Compare with Europe, where space and resources are a constant problem, alongside tensions between countries wasting time.

The US was playing the industrial revolution on easy mode, in comparison to everyone else

johncole•2 days ago

How semiconductors were made in the USA

loxodrome•about 3 hours ago

All the key people in CS, EE, and Physics needed to invent transistors where in America at the time.

Why? Mostly because America has true individual freedom and low taxes, unlike Europe.

wat10000•about 3 hours ago

More because Europe had just spent half a decade murdering each other on a massive scale, and there wasn't much energy left for basic research for a little while after experiencing a couple dozen megadeaths and the various urban remodeling programs that accompanied them.

petcat•about 2 hours ago

Europe has had many decades since then to innovate in technology and they have still not done so. They are almost completely dependent on American and Asian tech. And that is not changing anytime soon.

So yes, it had something to do with WWII, but that's not the only reason.

For instance, Japan and South Korea were both equally devastated and yet they both managed to build world class technology industries in the aftermath.

dadoum•44 minutes ago

> Europe has had many decades since then to innovate in technology and they have still not done so. They are almost completely dependent on American and Asian tech. And that is not changing anytime soon.

You are stating that like this has been the state of things for a century. The dependence on American and Asian tech has been a gradual process, that accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s. Before that time, every European countries had their own tech industries able to compete with the tech giants (Nokia, Siemens, Grundig, Alcatel, Thomson, Olivetti, Philips, Ericsson, Amstrad and that's only citing a few of the ones that marked history forever, only in the field consumer electronics, a lot of them back in the day were competing but ended up fading away, and also others were everywhere in the tech industry before without being really exposed to consumers).

flohofwoe•about 2 hours ago

*rolls eyes*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML

wat10000•35 minutes ago

The irony of making this post on a web site is quite amazing.

guywithahat•23 minutes ago

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. We were large enough that we could find the talent, and the country was free enough so that private industry could drive innovation. Low taxes let companies reinvest. We know this is what happened because the success of free markets isn't a mystery, it's well studied and documented.

bgnn•39 minutes ago

This is really inaccurate. The real reason is similar to why America was at the forefront of the other high tech sectors like aviation etc too: massive defense spending, a lot of business people (like Fairchild) willing to invest in a sector where they see the potential procurement from Pentagon, while starting to serve the civilian sector.