Book ID: CBB701316898

The microchip revolution: A brief history (2020)

unapi

Luc-Olivier Bauer (Author)
E. Marshall Wilder (Author)


Independently published


Publication Date: 2020
Physical Details: 383
Language: English

Numerous books have been written about the key founders of the semiconductor industry, about the early companies, the reasons for their success and failures, on the star products, and the men behind them. In conversations with the Computer History Museum (CHM) of Mountain View, California, the two authors, veterans of semiconductor manufacturing organizations, found that the history of semiconductor process development has been treated as an ancillary issue in top down discussions of what drove the extraordinary growth of this industry. We tell the story from a bottom-up point of view of wafer fab operation managers, which we were for many years. We narrate the extraordinary contributions from all team members of these wafer fab organizations: hourly operators, supervisors, maintenance technicians, as well as the creative scientists and engineers that created and managed the companies we profile. We concentrate on the dramatic improvements in manufacturing productivity in the main MOS technologies, which eventually all merged into very similar CMOS processes. We concentrate on the time period from 1957 (Fairchild founding) to the end of the last century, when much of the technology development migrated to foundry operations overseas. We tried to exercise great care to be fair in assessing the contributions of the various companies to the overall progress of the industry.In this spirit, we also recognize the huge contributions made by the semiconductor equipment companies, and their key engineers to the success of process development and production organizations.While basing the story of process developments on historical facts, with the help of the large document and library resources available, including those of the CHM, we also tell the extraordinary human experience of working with the early wafer fab teams, with the process architecture breakthroughs pioneers, and all other wafer fab workers. To this end we also interviewed many key contributors to these process and equipment breakthroughs that made the rapid advancements in the semiconductor technologies possible.

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Reviewed By

Review Christophe Lécuyer (January-March 2021) Review of "The microchip revolution: A brief history". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (pp. 95-96). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB701316898/

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Authors & Contributors
Cortada, James W.
Guy C. Fedorkow
Tinn, Honghong
Elzway, Salem
Davies, Stephen M.
Garvey, Colin
Concepts
History of Computing
Computers and computing
Software
Software engineering
Computer Programming
Computer security; cyber security
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
20th century, late
Places
United States
Great Britain
East Asia
Switzerland
New Zealand
Japan
Institutions
Peter Norton Computing Corporation
Symantec Corporation
Jōhō Shori Gakkai (Japan) -- Information Processing Society of Japan
ETH-Bibliothek, Zürich
National Health Service (Great Britain)
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