Word: chips
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Fifty years ago this week--shortly after lunch on Dec. 23, 1947--the Digital Revolution was born. It happened on a drizzly Tuesday in New Jersey, when two Bell Labs scientists demonstrated a tiny contraption they had concocted from some strips of gold foil, a chip of semiconducting material and a bent paper clip. As their colleagues watched with a mix of wonder and envy, they showed how their gizmo, which was dubbed a transistor, could take an electric current, amplify it and switch...
...addition, though wage stagnation seems to be easing, workers' insecurity remains high. The layoffs that have accompanied technological change have been burned into their minds like code on a ROM chip. The weakening of labor bargaining power, inherent in a global economy where jobs and investment can be shifted freely, has led to what William Greider in the Nation calls a "widening gap between an expanding production base worldwide and an inability of consumers to buy all the new output...
...leadership into the world's pre-eminent microprocessor manufacturer. From a standing start in 1981, when IBM introduced the first personal computers, they have populated the planet at an astounding rate. And of the 83 million machines sold this year, nearly 90% get their kick from an Intel chip. So do antilock brakes, Internet servers, cell phones and digital cameras. And who knows what products not yet invented will be powered by the chip 10, 20 years from...
...been easy. A history of the semiconductor business reads like a chapter of the Iliad: Unisem, dead of obsolescence; Advanced Memory Systems, killed by management; Mostek, slaughtered in a Japanese RAM invasion. Intel has endured crippling chip recessions, one Federal Trade Commission probe and a nasty public flogging over its flawed Pentium chips in 1994. Now the prospect of cheaper computers using cheaper chips, not to mention the threat of economic troubles in Asia, looms. But no firm does more reliable (or profitable) work in the tiny molecular spaces that Intel has colonized. It is the essential firm...
...rewards made possible by some neck-snapping breakthroughs. The key to the success dated back to an insight Moore had in 1965. Sitting down with a piece of log paper and a ruler, he drew a simple graph. On the vertical axis he tracked the growing complexity of silicon chips, along the bottom he ticked off time, and then he plotted the points out a few years. The resulting line, he saw, showed that chip power doubled roughly every 24 months, even as costs fell by half. The rule (amended to 18 months) became known as Moore's law. Though...