Semiconductor industry overlord: How are American integrated circuits made?

By 1956, U.S. electronic equipment sales exceeded $3 billion, half of which came from military purchases. In 1961 and 1962, the U.S. Air Force used silicon chips in computers and Minuteman missiles, respectively, and these projects helped integrated circuits gain a foothold in the military market for the first time.

In the early days, electronic technology was a national strategic resource, and its development was closely related to military needs. After the First World War, wireless communications were widely used, and both sides needed to encrypt their own communication information and intercept and crack the enemy's information. Relay computers were used at first, and the Z3 computer and the Mark series computers were relay computers. The calculation needs of ballistic firepower tables during World War II gave birth to the first general-purpose computer. Strict military applications promoted the development of microelectronics technology. When the transistor was born, the US military was the main funder and standard setter of research and development and production, and early transistors and integrated circuit products were mainly used in the military field.

In July 1943, the US Army funded a project to develop a new type of computer, namely an electronic digital computer. The machine was named "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer" (abbreviated as: ENIAC), and ENIAC was carried out secretly under the code name "PX Project". John von Neumann served as the project consultant for the project. He proposed the "von Neumann structure" including arithmetic units, controllers, memory, input, and output, which greatly promoted the development of electronic technology and computers. In February 1946, the ENIAC computer was successfully developed with extremely superior performance. It only took 30 seconds for a differential machine to calculate the trajectory of a 60-second range ballistic projectile, while it took 20 hours.

In 1947, Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen of Bell Labs invented the transistor. Using transistors instead of electron tubes was a major breakthrough in electronic products. After the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs, the U.S. military has been funding the development of this technology. From 1948 to 1957, the military undertook 38% of the $22.3 million in transistor research costs at Bell Labs. Especially in the mid-1950s, the military's funding for Bell Labs once reached 50% of the transistor research funding. The first contract between Bell Labs and the military was from 1949 to 1951, focusing on applications and circuit research; the second contract was from 1951 to 1958, mainly conducting research on services, facilities, and materials of interest to the military.

The military's demand for electronic technology has benefited American electronics companies greatly, and their development is also closely related to the US military. Here we can take some companies as examples. For example, after IBM entered the computer field, its main customer was the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia. IBM also established its leadership in the computer field because of its participation in an important military project, the "Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Detection System" (abbreviated as: SAGE). IBM 704 and IBM 709 also became industry standards. The concept used by IBM 704 was originally designed for another military contract. Another example is AT&T. AT&T's Bell Labs built the first all-transistor computer TRADIC (Transistor Digital Computer) for the US Air Force in 1954, but AT&T was prohibited from engaging in commercial computer business. Another example is Dalma Manufacturing Company, which many people may not be familiar with. It developed the first airborne radar antenna during World War II.

By 1956 , U.S. electronic equipment sales exceeded $ 3 billion, half of which came from military purchases. In 1961 and 1962, the U.S. Air Force used silicon chips in computers and Minuteman missiles, respectively, and these projects helped integrated circuits gain a foothold in the military market for the first time.

From the vacuum tube era to the transistor era, the United States originated and established the first-mover advantage

Thomas Alva Edison is a well-known American inventor. In 1883, Edison conducted a small experiment to find the best filament material for light bulbs. He installed a small piece of copper wire near the carbon filament inside the vacuum light bulb, hoping that the copper wire could prevent the carbon filament from evaporating, but he failed. He accidentally discovered a strange phenomenon: although the metal sheet did not touch the filament, if a voltage was applied between them, the filament would generate a current that shot toward the nearby metal sheet. At that time, Edison was concentrating on studying the city's power system and did not pay attention to this phenomenon. But he applied for a patent for this discovery and named it the "Edison Effect."

In 1904, Fleming developed the first diode using the Edison effect and obtained a patent. This diode can be used as a detector for radio telegraph. In 1906, De Forest cleverly added a grid between the filaments of the diode and invented the first vacuum electron triode for detection and amplification. In 1912, General Electric and AT&T jointly developed a high vacuum electron triode, which greatly increased the magnification of the triode and made the working performance more stable. As a result, the electron tube entered the practical stage, and then derived industries such as radio, television, and computers, which is the cornerstone of today's electronic products.

As mentioned above, the military greatly promoted the development of electronic technology. It was with the use of the above-mentioned electron tube technology that the first electronic computer ENIAC was born, using 17,468 electronic triodes, 7,200 electronic diodes, and weighing 30 tons.

The development of ENIAC also exposed the problem of electron tubes: they were large and clumsy. For this reason, Bell Labs in the United States set up a solid-state physics research team to try to create a semiconductor device that could replace electron tubes. Bell Labs studied semiconductor materials and found that the rectification performance of doped semiconductors was better than that of electron tubes. It decided to focus on semiconductor materials such as silicon and germanium to explore the possibility of using semiconductor materials to make amplifier devices. In December 1947, the semiconductor research team headed by Shockley found that by connecting electrodes to the bottom of a germanium sheet, inserting a thin needle on the other side and passing a current, and then letting another thin needle get as close to it as possible and passing a weak current, the original current would change greatly. A small change in weak current will have a great impact on other currents, which is the "amplification" effect. In the first test, it can amplify the audio signal 100 times. In this way, the first transistor was born.

Since the 1950s, transistors have gradually replaced vacuum tubes, and eventually mass production of integrated circuits and microprocessors has been achieved. In 1954, Bell Labs developed the first transistorized computer, TRADIC, which used about 700 transistors and 10,000 germanium diodes, and could perform 1 million logic operations per second with a power of only 100 watts. In 1955, IBM developed a commercial computer containing 2,000 transistors.

Fairchild: In the era of integrated circuits, Fairchild Semiconductor created most of the semiconductor industry and ushered in the golden age of semiconductors

Transistors replaced electron tubes and reduced their size, but as more and more transistors were piled up, new problems emerged: there were more and more devices and connections in the circuit, and the wiring and response of the circuit encountered bottlenecks. The idea of ​​higher integration also came into being. In 1958, Kilby of Texas Instruments developed the world's first integrated circuit and applied for a patent for a miniaturized electronic circuit in February 1959. This integrated circuit was integrated with five components including germanium transistors, and a simple integrated circuit called a phase-shift oscillator was made based on germanium materials.

At the same time, in 1959, Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor developed a diffusion technology and PN junction isolation technology using silicon dioxide shielding, and invented the world's first silicon integrated circuit based on silicon planar technology. He submitted a patent application for the integrated circuit in 1959, but emphasized that Fairchild's integrated circuit was manufactured using planar technology.

Since then, Fairchild Semiconductor has developed numerous important integrated circuit products, including operational amplifiers, practical analog integrated circuits, complementary metal oxide semiconductor integrated circuits, etc., which have promoted the rapid development of the integrated circuit industry.

Technological success does not mean that a company can move forward courageously. Fairchild Semiconductor was not outstanding in business. Under Noyce's loose management, core members left one after another, and competitors soon caught up. In 1967, Fairchild Semiconductor announced its first loss. The loss of $7.6 million caused the stock price to fall from $3 per share a year ago to $0.5, and the market value shrank significantly. The departure of the soul figure seemed to have laid the foundation for the decline of Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1979, Fairchild Semiconductor was acquired by Schlumberger, a French oil company.

In 1987, Schlumberger sold Fairchild Semiconductor to another American company, National Semiconductor (NSC), at one-third of the original price. In 1997, NSC sold Fairchild Semiconductor for $550 million to compete with Intel and AMD, and used the funds to buy Cyrix, the world's third largest microprocessor manufacturer, as a bargaining chip to compete with Intel.