Word: groving
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...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...
...politics. Noyce phoned Arthur Rock, now the eminence grise of Silicon Valley investing, and told him that he and Moore wanted to start their own semiconductor company. Fairchild, he said, was finished. Rock (who holds nearly $500 million of Intel stock today) raised the money nearly instantly. Moore told Grove of the plan one day when they were at a conference in Boulder, Colo. The decision to join his bosses was made, Grove says, "almost instantly." Someone suggested the name Integrated Electronics, which was shrunk instantly to Intel...
Intel did not enjoy an uninterrupted march to greatness. The problem wasn't any lack of candlepower--Noyce, Grove and Moore were a dream team. The problem was the business itself. It kept changing. Just as Intel's leaders decided the future was in, say, selling dynamic RAM (a kind of short-term computer memory), messages started trickling back that sales were tanking, customers were evaporating and, ahem, top management had better pick a new strategy. It was a miserable way to run a company: desperately leaping into lifeboats, always at the last possible moment. One night Grove dreamed...