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Essay on Sources
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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399 ESSAY ON SOURCES A large body of work exists on the history of semiconductor technology, but it is uneven, reflecting the writers’ diverse backgrounds as historians, journalists, participants, and economists. This is reflected in the only two works that deal with the history of the MOS transistor at any length. George Gilder’s Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989) is alternately exhilarating and exasperating. Gilder is an enthusiastic student of technology drawn to the big picture—he understood the implications of MOS technology well before they became clear to most of the rest of the world. But his work is burdened by his own philosophical and political predilections, and one senses that in his eagerness to look at the big picture, he gets bored with details, where he is frequently unreliable. (Gilder’s work is reviewed by two Silicon Valley executives in T. J. Rodgers, ‘‘Landmark Messages from the Microcosm,’’ Harvard Business Review, January–February 1990, 24–30; and Robert N. Noyce, ‘‘False Hopes and High-Tech Fiction,’’ Harvard Business Review , January–February 1990, 31–36.) Chih-Tang Sah’s ‘‘Evolution of MOS Transistor —From Conception to VLSI,’’ Proceedings of the IEEE 76 (October 1988): 1280–1326, provides the authoritative knowledge of a leading researcher in the field and a comprehensive list of technical citations but is less successful at presenting the historical development of the technology. Of the broader histories of semiconductor technology, Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), provides the definitive history of the invention and early development of the transistor but stops before MOS work begins in earnest. Their research also led to the articles ‘‘Origins of the p-n Junction,’’ IEEE Spectrum, June 1997, 46–51; and ‘‘The Moses of Silicon Valley,’’ Physics Today, December 400 Essay on Sources 1997, 42–47. Previously, Hoddeson had written a number of articles that had established her position as the preeminent scholar of the history of solid-state physics. These include ‘‘The Discovery of the Point-Contact Transistor,’’ Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 12 (1981): 41–76; ‘‘The Entry of the Quantum Theory of Solids into the Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1925–1940: A Case Study of the Industrial Application of Fundamental Science,’’ Minerva 18 (1980): 422– 47; and ‘‘Research on Crystal Rectifiers during World War II and the Invention of the Transistor,’’ History and Technology 11 (1994): 121–30. Hoddeson, along with Ernest Braun, Jürgen Teichmann, and Spencer Weart, also edited Out of the Crystal Maze: Chapters from the History of Solid-State Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), which concentrates on the scientific developments in solid-state physics prior to the development of the transistor. Ernest Braun and Stuart MacDonald produced one of the earliest histories of semiconductor technology in Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics , 2d ed. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and although it gives only cursory attention to MOS technology, it introduced a number of important themes. Stan Augarten’s State of the Art: A Photographic History of the Integrated Circuit (New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor and Fields, 1983) is not a conventional history of semiconductor technology, but much can be gleaned from his collection of pictures of transistors and integrated circuits spanning a thirty-five-year period. Raymond Warner provides an insightful participant’s account of the history of semiconductor technology up to the early 1970s based on his experiences at Bell Labs, Motorola, and Texas Instruments in the introduction to his engineering text, R. M. Warner Jr. and B. L. Grung, Transistors: Fundamentals for the Integrated Circuit Engineer (New York: Wiley, 1983), 1–91. Frederick Seitz and Norman G. Einspruch’s Electronic Genie: The Tangled History of Silicon (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1998) provides a history of silicon science and technology that is much broader in its coverage than other work. While the special issue of Electronic Engineering Times on the history of the integrated circuit, ‘‘Thirty Who Made a Difference: The 30th Anniversary of the Integrated Circuit,’’ Electronic Engineering Times, September 1988, introduces many personalities, it is highly idiosyncratic and not completely reliable. Bruce E. Deal and James M. Early provide an authoritative technical review in ‘‘The Evolution of Silicon Semiconductor Technology, 1952–1977,’’ Journal of the Electrochemical Society 126 (January 1979): 20C–32C. [3.93.173.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:06 GMT...