The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter (книги полностью .txt) 📗

Fairchild readily put up $1.5 million to start the new company—about twice what the eight founders had originally thought necessary—in return for an option deal. If the company turned out to be successful, he would be able to buy it outright for $3 million.

Dubbed “the traitorous eight,” Noyce and his posse set up shop just down the road from Shockley on the outskirts of Palo Alto. Shockley Semiconductor never recovered. Six years later, Shockley gave up and joined the faculty of Stanford. His paranoia deepened, and he became obsessed with his notion that blacks were genetically inferior in terms of IQ and should be discouraged from having children. The genius who conceptualized the transistor and brought people to the promised land of Silicon Valley became a pariah who could not give a lecture without facing hecklers.

The traitorous eight who formed Fairchild Semiconductor, by contrast, turned out to be the right people at the right place at the right time. The demand for transistors was growing because of the pocket radios that Pat Haggerty had launched at Texas Instruments, and it was about to skyrocket even higher; on October 4, 1957, just three days after Fairchild Semiconductor was formed, the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite and set off a space race with the United States. The civilian space program, along with the military program to build ballistic missiles, propelled the demand for both computers and transistors. It also helped assure that the development of these two technologies became linked. Because computers had to be made small enough to fit into a rocket’s nose cone, it was imperative to find ways to cram hundreds and then thousands of transistors into tiny devices.

I.?For example, the engineers and theorists discovered that silicon (which has four electrons in its outer orbit) that was doped with phosphorus or arsenic (which have five electrons in their outer orbits) had spare electrons and thus was a negative-charged carrier. The result was called an n-type semiconductor. Silicon that was doped with boron (with three electrons in its outer orbit) had a deficit of electrons—there were “holes” where some electrons would normally be—and thus was positively charged, making it known as a p-type semiconductor.

II.?His son Fred Terman later became the famous dean and provost at Stanford.

III.?For a short video of Shannon and his machines juggling, see https://www2.bc.edu/~lewbel/shortsha.mov.

Jack Kilby (1923–2005) at Texas Instruments in 1965.

Kilby’s microchip.

Arthur Rock (1926– ) in 1997.

Andy Grove (1936– ) with Noyce and Moore at Intel in 1978.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE MICROCHIP

In a paper written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the transistor, published in 1957 just when Fairchild Semiconductor was formed and Sputnik launched, a Bell Labs executive identified a problem that he dubbed “the tyranny of numbers.” As the number of components in a circuit increased, the number of connections increased way faster. If a system had, for example, ten thousand components, that might require 100,000 or more little wire links on the circuit boards, most often soldered by hand. This was not a recipe for reliability.

It was, instead, part of a recipe for an innovation. The need to solve this growing problem coincided with hundreds of small advances in ways to manufacture semiconductors. This combination produced an invention that occurred independently in two different places, Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor. The result was an integrated circuit, also known as a microchip.

JACK KILBY

Jack Kilby was another of those boys from the rural Midwest who tinkered in the workshop with his dad and built ham radios.¹ “I grew up among the industrious descendants of the western settlers of the American Great Plains,” he declared when he won a Nobel Prize.² He was raised in Great Bend, in the middle of Kansas, where his father ran a local utility company. In the summer they would drive in the family Buick to far-flung generating plants and, when something had gone wrong, crawl through them together looking for the problem. During one bad blizzard they used a ham radio to keep in touch with areas where customers had lost phone service, and young Kilby became fascinated by the importance of such technologies. “It was during an ice storm in my teens,” he told the Washington Post’s T. R. Reid, “that I first saw how radio and, by extension, electronics, could really impact people’s lives by keeping them informed and connected, and giving them hope.”³ He studied to get a ham operator’s license and kept upgrading his radio using parts that he scrounged.

After being turned down by MIT, he went to the University of Illinois, interrupting his studies after Pearl Harbor to join the Navy. Deployed to a radio repair facility in India, he made runs to Calcutta to buy parts on the black market, using them to build better receivers and transmitters in a pup-tent lab. He was a gentle guy with a wide smile and an easygoing, taciturn manner. What made him special was his insatiable curiosity about inventions. He began to read every new patent issued. “You read everything—that’s part of the job,” he said. “You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful.”⁴

His first job was at Centralab, a Milwaukee firm that made electronic parts. It experimented with ways of combining the components used to make hearing aids onto a single ceramic base, a rough precursor of the idea for a microchip. In 1952 Centralab was one of the companies that paid $25,000 for a license to make transistors, and it was the beneficiary of Bell’s willingness to share its knowledge. Kilby attended a two-week Bell Labs seminar—staying with dozens of others at a Manhattan hotel and being loaded every morning onto a bus for Murray Hill—that included in-depth sessions on transistor design, hands-on experience in the labs, and visits to a manufacturing plant. Bell sent all attendees three volumes of technical papers. With its extraordinary willingness to license its patents cheaply and share its knowledge, Bell Labs laid the foundations for the Digital Revolution, even though it didn’t fully capitalize on it.

In order to be at the forefront of transistor development, Kilby realized that he needed to work at a bigger company. Weighing a variety of offers, he decided in the summer of 1958 to join Texas Instruments, where he would get to work with Pat Haggerty and his brilliant transistor research team led by Willis Adcock.

The policy at Texas Instruments was for everyone to take off the same two weeks in July. So when Kilby arrived in Dallas with no accrued vacation time, he was one of the very few people in the semiconductor lab. This gave him time to think about what could be done with silicon other than fabricate it into transistors.

He knew that if you created a bit of silicon without any impurities, it would act as a simple resistor. There was also a way, he realized, to make a p-n junction in a piece of silicon act as a capacitor, meaning it could store a small electrical charge. In fact, you could make any electronic component out of differently treated silicon. From that he came up with what became known as the “monolithic idea”: you could make all of these components in one monolithic piece of silicon, thus eliminating the need to solder together different components on a circuit board. In July 1958, six months before Noyce wrote down a similar idea, Kilby described it in his lab notebook in a sentence that would later be quoted in his Nobel Prize citation: “The following circuit elements could be made on a single slice: resistors, capacitor, distributed capacitor, transistor.” Then he drew a few crude sketches of how to construct these components by configuring sections of silicon that had been doped with impurities to have different properties on a single slab.