Word: chip
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What complicates the issue is that the electronics industry is as divided as the Administration on these questions. Even as U.S. chipmakers cry for tough Government action to open Japan's vast chip market to increased sales of American-made semiconductors, U.S. computer makers, who stuff their machines with foreign chips, are worried that trade tension could endanger their supply. In recent months, joint ventures between U.S. and Japanese chipmakers have multiplied at such a rate that it is getting hard to tell where one country's interests end and the other's begin...
...beat-up Chrysler and listened to endless anecdotes over tuna sandwiches. "I worried that these were only a wall of stories," he says. "I came to realize that Tip's opinions were expressed through his stories." He arrived at the White House carrying a bag of Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookies, Nancy Reagan's favorite. When he met her at the Reagan ranch, where she is known to favor jeans, he showed up in jeans. "Bill's like a great character actor," says Peter Osnos, his editor at Random House. "His self-effacing quality allows his subjects their own expression...
Sensors like those made by Delco were the first to combine microelectronics and micromachines on one chip. The typical microsensor is a thin silicon diaphragm studded with resistors. Because the electrical resistance of silicon crystals changes when they are bent, the slightest stress on the diaphragm can be registered by the resistors and amplified by electronic circuits...
...payoff can be enormous. As electronics manufacturers have discovered, the laws of economics at the micro level are as different as the laws of physics. A manufacturer might spend a small fortune putting hundreds of moving parts and circuits onto a single silicon chip. But when that chip goes into large-scale production and millions of copies are made, the economies of scale take over, and development costs virtually disappear...
Unfortunately, there is a limit to how many transistors can be squeezed onto the surface of a chip. Thus the attraction of micromachines. They give engineers a way to shrink the moving parts of a device rather than trying to shrink its computer controls further. Some experts believe that within the next 25 years micromachinery will do for machines what microelectronics did for electronics. Given the progress over the past quarter-century, that is saying...