Customer Reviews

Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The writing is reasonably engaging and does its best to attract general interest to a technical subject. However the tactics with which it does so are more National Enquirer than New York Times. The author decides to choose sides in the debate over who invented the microchip, and delivers pages of invective to support his position. The industry, in contrast, recognized both Kilby and Noyce as inventors and paid royalties to both companies they worked for. In short, the author tries to retroactively arrange a boxing match between the inventors, while the co-inventors in reality cordially shook hands and agreed to split the profits. The intensely partisan presentation of the story in this book is a gross offense to the characters of the inventors.

In addition, the text is littered with errors. "A diode is a dam that blocks current under some conditions and opens it to let electricity flow when the conditions change" is a mighty vague way to say that diodes let current flow one direction and not the reverse. "Materials that have proven the best insulators are indeed those with eight outer electrons" flat out does not parse. Does the material have eight electrons? Is he trying to say that noble gases are the best insulators? "Elements with three or fewer outer electrons are conductors, and those with five or more are insulators" would come as a surprise to metals such as arsenic, antimony or selenium. "Shockley had a reputation for getting the most out of the people who worked for him". I won't even touch that one. "The process that eventually proved best - the process still used today in semiconductor manufacture - was a Bell Labs discovery called diffusion" has so many inaccuracies in one sentence it's hard to know where to start. One might as well say "Plumbing is a process that depends on leakage, a phenomenon invented by the Greeks."

For all that, the book help personalize and make memorable the birth of the silicon chip. It occasionally does a very effective job of distilling the essence of a discovery. If taken with a grain of salt as a journalist's account of an engineering breakthrough, it will leave some lasting memories.

Technophobes might as well move on to the next review. I loved this book. It explained in clear, precise language how innumerable barriers were overcome by innovative and insightfully brilliant individuals to create a device that revolutionized our lives. I've always been fascinated by electronics, built my own radios and earned an amateur radio license in 7th grade, just because the subject and theory of how electrons move around to perform useful functions is intriguing. Reid has captured much of that fascination and translated it into a great story.

Before integrated circuits could be produced, the transistor had to be invented. Before that time, switching mechanism, required a vacuum tube to control, amplify and switch the flow of electrons through a circuit. It was the discovery that some semiconductor materials could be doped to have an excess of positive charges or negative charges that provided the breakthrough. A strip of germanium could be doped at each end with differing charges leaving a junction in the middle. The junction worked like a turnstile that could control the flow of current when connected to a battery. Variations in current across these junctions connected in the transistor formation could rectify (prevent current from flowing in both directions) and amplify. That's all that's needed to make a radio (I'm oversimplifying obviously) and hundreds of other devices. Transistors required vastly less current than vacuum tubes, were almost infinitely stable, were cheap and gave off little heat.

But, transistors required thousands of connections to the wires coming in order to make a useful circuit, and as demands for more complex circuitry arose the wiring became infinitely complex. This interconnection problem became a huge barrier that could have prevented the effective utilization of the advantages of the transistor

"You read everything. . . You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful," remembers Jack Kilby, one of the inventors of the integrated circuit. He also insists that he is not a scientist but an engineer. "A scientist is motivated by knowledge; he basically wants to explain something. An engineer's drive is to solve problems, to make something work. . . . Reid has elegantly interwoven the biographies of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. One of the delights of the book was learning how the two inventors thought, how they proceeded, and why they went in the directions they did.

Robert Noyce, founder of Intel, had developed a process to make transistors in arrays on a silicon wafer. They cut apart the transistors and then hired "thousands of women with tweezers to pick them up and try to wire them together. It just seemed so stupid." He, too, realized the tyranny of interconnection numbers. What they both came up with was the "Monolithic Idea." The notion that an entire circuit could be designed and produced on those silicon chips.

Obviously, there is little suspense in the story, but Reid captures and holds our attention. Both men accomplished the same feat at about the same time, approaching it from different directions. Kilby showed how the transistors could be placed on a single wafer and Noyce showed how the chips and circuits could be manufactured. Every transistor radio used the patent Kilby was awarded for his work. In so doing, he turned the future that Orwell had predicted in 1984 on its head. Instead of a monolithic centralization of power in the hands of a few computer elite who controlled all the computing power, "the mass distribution of microelectronics had spawned a massive decentralization of computing power. In the real 1984, millions of ordinary people could match the governmental or corporate computer bit for bit. In the real 1984, the stereotypical computer user had become a Little Brother seated at the keyboard to write his seventh-grade science report."

The social impact was enormous. Slide rules that had been ubiquitous were completely eliminated in just a few years by the handheld calculator that has become so cheap it is often given away in promotions. The Japanese gained virtual control over the memory chip industry because of the way they handled their work force. Americans had a monopoly until the 1973 recession. American companies typically lay off workers to save money during downturns. The Japanese try to keep their work force employed. This meant that when the demand for chips exploded, Americans did not have the capacity to produce enough to meet the demand. The Japanese, having trained workers available, met that demand and were able to produce enough at such a volume to keep the price so low as to inhibit any competition. That and their emphasis on high quality gained them 42% of the world market by 1980. The "Anderson Bombshell" report of 1980 (Anderson was a manager at Hewlett-Packard) that showed that Japanese chips were far more reliable than those made in the United States helped seal their market share.

It took winning the Nobel Prize for Noyce and Kilby to be recognized in the United States (Japan, a nation that honors its engineers, had awarded Noyce and Kilby numerous accolades over the years.) The final irony remains that in "our media-soaked society, with its insatiable appetite for important, or at least interesting, personalities, has somehow managed to overlook a pair of genuine national heroes- two Americans who had a good idea that has improved the daily lot of the world."

I found this book to be helpful and informative. It does a good job of explaining the Ideas, thoughts, history, and science behind one of today greatest enigmas the micro chip. Things like why did we have to switch to integrated circuits? Who came up with the idea? I found it to be an excelent source on the co-inventors Kilby and Noyce. The author does a good job of making the history lessons engaging. Few people have even the slightest idea what really goes on in the electronic devices we take for granted. This books goes a long way toward filling that gap of knowledge, and I encourage any one that is even slightly curious to read it.

"The Chip" attempts to pack a lot of history and a lot of ideas into a very short 260-odd pages. For the most part, it succeeds. The reader gets just enough history on boolean logic, Thomas Edison, and vacuum tubes to appreciate the astounding achievment of the first monolithic circuit without feeling overwhelmed by the technical details. But, this book is more than technological history; it also chronicles the personalities of the men who invented the machines, Kilby and (independently) Noyce. The politics of the chip are also covered, e.g., patent infringements (it took years to settle who invented the concept) and American efforts to beat back Japanese incursion into the chip market in the 1970s and 80s.

The depth of the treatments of all of these subjects is just enough to tell you what you need to know about the major events and players, though I have to admit, in many places I would have willingly accepted more detail. I have the feeling that the book could have easily been twice as long if Reid had wanted it to be and I probably wouldn't have minded at all.

TR Reid, who studied ancient Greek and Latin at Princeton, has written an excellent short history of integrated circuits, or microchips, which is accessible to any high school student. The basic concepts and main figures, such as Kilby and Haggerty at Texas Instruments, Noyce at Intel, and others are described extremely well in language that is easily understandable, interesting, and enjoyable to read. On top of that, it is good pointers to other, more detailed books at the end.

If you have a PhD in electrical engineering, or are a veteran of the industry, you may, on the other hand, feel that this book is too short for your liking.

The subject matter seems daunting. The photograph on the cover of the book, which shows two inventors, is intimidating. But do not be deceived. The book is not daunting or intimidating.

LEVEL OF READING. The first 50 or so pages reads like a little kids' book. Later on, the subject matter gets more advanced. Almost anybody can read the entire book in one sitting. At any rate, the writing flows along, and we learn many interesting details about the beginnings of the Silicon Valley. The author does not "talk down" to the reader. The problem, at least to me, is that none of the business relationships regarding setting up various semiconductor companies is disclosed in any detail. Also, nothing much is disclosed about how electrical engineers interact in the inventive process. Another complaint is that the book is very small--eight inches by five inches.

PATENTS. The author pauses to provide a background in patent law (pages 98-102). While the author certainly meant well, the "information" provided on patents is a bit messed up. There is a page on trade secrets and Coca Cola (not relevant to patents in electronics). There is a paragraph on Thomas Jefferson's stint in examining patents (not relevant to patents in electronics). The author writes about a patent being a "sword or a shield." But patent attorneys do not habitually characterize patents as a "sword or a shield." Instead, they characterize patents as a "limited monopoly." The author writes that patent examiners "are generally lawyers." But this is false. Patent examiners in mechanical arts and electrical arts just have an undergraduate degree, while examiners in the biotech arts have a Ph.D. On a rare occasion, a patent examiner has a law degree. The author also writes that "the lawyers threw in some language to fudge the issue." (page 105). But this is false. The author fails to realize that the language in question is standard in most or all patents, and is just added as a matter of custom (it is not added to "fudge" any issues). Another problem is that the author fails to mention that the single greatest reason to have patents is to grant the inventor a limited MONOPOLY. Nowhere in these pages does the author mention "monopoly."

I don't have much confidence that anything written in this book is as reliable as it could be. I am under the impression that the author was thinking this while writing the book: "If I gear the writing level to that of an intelligent teenager, and if only teenagers read my book, then perhaps none of my readers will suspect that I have no idea what I'm writing about!!!"

RECOMMENDATIONS. For readers interested in an adult-oriented book on semiconductors, I recommend CRYSTAL FIRE by Michael Riordan. For teenagers or adults interested in techno-biographies on other topics relating to electronics and such, I recommend Robert Buderi's THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD (which concerns radar), A.Edward Evenson's THE TELEPHONE PATENT CONSPIRACY OF 1876, or Nick Taylor's fine book, LASER. I might suggest, CATHEDRALS OF SCIENCE by Patrick Coffey.

I am referring to Mr. T. R. Reid. His book, The Chip, is a tour de force that takes the reader on a journey at once historical and cerebral-, even spiritual. This absorbing account of the mircoelectronics revolution integrates (among other subjects): the biographies of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, the counting systems of ancient Babylonians and Myans, the arcane ideas of 19th century mathematician George Boole, solid state physics, statistics, politics, patent law, and an Alice story. Reid interconnects people and ideas from varied disciplines as elegantly as the silcon chip integrates the varied components of the electronic circuit. So The Chip is both an exposition of a type of physical integration and itself a demonstration of another, a more general type of the thing it describes.

Readers from diverse backgrounds should be stimulated on one or more levels by The Chip. I sincerely hope the book could find its way on the required reading list of High Schools across the country. For this book is about America and for America, weaving together larger themes of individualism, optimism, innovation, amelioration, and, most of all, wonder. It is at once guidebook and soul food, leading, nurturing, sustaining..., lighting up the fires of the creative imagination. So follow this torchlight of a review and pass into the rich and dazzling realm of The Chip.

Reid balances the general narrative with the "drilling down" into details with virtuosity. You brain will love the way he lays the information out. You'll never get bored throughout the book. The author successfully reverse-engineers the story of electronics all the way down to a vacuum tube. Read this book yourself and read it to your kids.
Vicki

The Chip is a very readable book with excellent background, easily understood!
For anyone wanting an overview of the computer revolution and how the micro-chip evolved, this is a must read!

This book is very insightful especially for those young people who were not around at the turn of the 20th century for the invention of the light bulb (that may be most of us)in how it brought about the invention of the tube, the transistor and hence the chip. It is very clear and informative in its total development. It brings the reader into the world of the inventor, their hopes, dreams and aspirations. Moreover, it brings you a glimpse of what scientist/inventors must do to prove down the road if they indeed invented said invention. Finally, it brings a complete idea of how Americans created industries but only to loose them to their competitive counter parts by their lack of vision in the production process that resulted in poor quality standards. The book is a must read especially for those interested in how Intel became to be known as Intel especially from the human perspective of the inventor. A great read for all.