Word: groves
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Grove and two colleagues he discovered in the company cafeteria--Bruce Deal and Edward Snow--then set out to make silicon usable. After months of work, they discovered that most of the MOS instability was traceable to an impurity--sodium--introduced when the chips were cured. Like a drop of lemon juice added to a cup of milk, sodium soured the precious semiconductors. The discovery solved a fundamental problem in materials science and set the stage for the semiconductor revolution. Grove and his team won one of the industry's most prestigious awards for the work. At home...
...speaking English, and I'm reading Faulkner!") But when he graduated in 1960, the New York Times trumpeted the success. His professors knew they'd hear from him again. "I was a little astonished by that kind of ambition," says Morris Kolodney, now 86, a CCNY professor who was Grove's freshman adviser. "There's some advantage in being hungry...
...first day of work, Grove knew exactly none of this. He merely wanted to make a good impression. Nervous? You can't imagine. Here he was, trained as a fluid dynamicist and going to work in materials chemistry. (The math, everyone promised him, was pretty much the same.) Someone asked him to study the electrical characteristics of MOS. Grove delivered a sharp, comprehensive report. His bosses were impressed...
...moved out to California, where Grove entered the Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley. Again he was a star. When he graduated, he had the pick of American research corporations. Grove narrowed his choices: prestigious Bell Laboratories or Fairchild Semiconductor, a start-up staffed by a handful of brilliant engineers. Grove, who says he has "excellent antennae," listened to the Berkeley buzz and came back with a sense of the future: Fairchild...
...answer, of course, turned out to be what gave Silicon Valley its name. Gordon Moore (who ran Fairchild's research arm and later became Grove's mentor as CEO of Intel) believed you could store those charges with an integrated circuit made by sandwiching metal oxide and silicon into an electrical circuit called an MOS transistor. Unlike trickier semiconductors, silicon is both a wonderful conductor of electrical charges and a nearly bottomless sink for heat, meaning it doesn't melt down as you push electrons under its surface at nearly light speed. Because it is made from refined sand, silicon...