Abstract

The book offers insights into four critical years of the history of semiconductor technology. The center of the attention is Fairchild Semiconductor, a start-up in 1957 and a key firm in the semiconductor business by 1961, established enough to be able to feed with people a series of start-ups that played a leading role in the development of the semiconductor industry and the broader industrial sector developed around electronics-based computing and communication. Makers of the Microchip wonderfully retrieves and interprets the links between flexibility in experimenting at the micro-material level and the emergence and establishment of what is known as ‘venture capital.’ It convincingly shows that the cluster of fundamental innovations developed at Fairchild Semiconductors during this brief span of time—from the manufacturing technology for diffused silicon devices to the planar process and the planar integrated circuit—would have been impossible without a fundamental change in the for ..