This is really inaccurate. The real reason is similar to why America was at the forefront of the other high tech sectors like aviation etc too: massive defense spending, a lot of business people (like Fairchild) willing to invest in a sector where they see the potential procurement from Pentagon, while starting to serve the civilian sector.
The origin of the semiconductor industry of USA is in the WWII military research for microwave detectors used in radars.
The vacuum diodes were no longer useful at such high frequencies, so it was attempted to make better point-contact semiconductor diodes using germanium and silicon pure crystals, instead of using natural minerals, like galena, which had poor performance and were not reproducible.
Much of this WWII research and development effort has been done at the Bell labs. The most important results were the development of technologies for purifying germanium and silicon at levels never succeeded before for other chemical substances, for growing single crystals of Ge and Si, and for doping them in a controlled way with impurities.
Before WWII, all attempts to make semiconductor devices with good performances were unsuccessful, with the exception of a few applications that had very low performance requirements, like the AC rectifiers with selenium or copper oxide. The reason is that the properties of semiconductors are hugely influenced by even very small amounts of impurities or crystal defects.
Only by the end of WWII, with the availability of pure single crystals of germanium and silicon, which were the result of radar development during the war, the research on semiconductor devices could really start.
The experimental discovery of the point-contact transistor by Bardeen and Brattain was a direct product of the Bell team trying to find other applications for the technology of making point-contact diodes that was developed at Bell during the war. Then, stimulated by the experimental results, Shockley, who was an excellent theoretical physicist, developed a theory of the electrical conduction in semiconductors that has been the basis for the invention of the other semiconductor devices during the following decades. Shockley himself has invented several semiconductor devices using his theory, the very important BJT (bipolar junction transistor) and JFET (junction field-effect transistor) and the less important PNPN diode (a.k.a. Shockley diode).
The announcement of the transistor, which was "open-sourced" by the Bell Labs triggered intense efforts of R&D in semiconductor devices at many companies in USA and all over the world.
The very quick evolution of the semiconductor industry in USA and abroad during the first decades was determined by a complete disregard for what nowadays is called "IP".
ATT and the Bell Labs licensed the semiconductor technology cheaply to anyone and even gave it for free for certain purposes (e.g. for the purpose of making hearing aids, respecting the wishes of Alexander Graham Bell, the founder of ATT).
Then, in the following years, all advances in semiconductor devices and semiconductor technology were published with complete recipes of how to reproduce them. This ensured that all innovations spread immediately to all companies active in this domain. While significant inventions were patented, at that time patents were typically still licensed fairly and non-discriminatory, instead of being used as weapons against competitors.
The semiconductor and computer industries would have never flourished and something like the Silicon Valley would have never been created in the current environment of secrecy and paranoia about "protecting IP" and of abusing the patent and copyright laws to prevent competition and reach monopoly status.
To be fair, not protecting "IP" was the right strategy when the market for the semiconductor industry was growing, because the sharing of all knowledge ensured a much faster growth of the market, which was achieved both by replacing older technologies and by creating new applications enabled by the properties of the new devices. The growth of the market ensured that sharing was a win for each company.
In a stagnant market, a company can grow only if another shrinks, so a much more adversarial attitude is needed if growth is the goal, like weaponizing the "IP".
I love the talk! But I do feel something critical is missing. You can not talk about semi-conductors without at least mentioning Walter Schottky (but I think that doesn't fit the narrative because he was a German).
Connections suggested without supporting info. I don't buy them. Maybe there's more info in the video, but the terrible AI intro (one of the worst I've seen) did not encourage confidence.
Watched some of the video. The connection between "freedom of speech" and "shoddy logic" is that Shockley invented the transistor despite being a raging racist. This was the best supported argument of the bunch.
It's an interesting point about that time in history, but I still don't buy the argument. Does it hold up when looking at which countries lead the world in semiconductor manufacturing today?
The bit about how semiconductors could only have been made in America because only America had the specific combination of freedom of speech, irreverence, pragmatism over dogmatism, meritocracy and welcoming outsiders is definitely an interesting idea, although how true that is?
If you have a diode, then the transistor is only a small step away.
Semiconductor physics books require you to work through a lot of material until you understand the diode, and then the bipolar transistor is just one next chapter.
> If you have a diode, then the transistor is only a small step away.
It is not. We've had semiconductor diodes since 1874, but it took many decades to develop the solid state physics to understand how they worked and how to extend them.
Crucially, you need some understanding of quantum theory (energy levels, Fermi distributions, etc), which was not developed until the 20s and 30s.
Even after they had the physics down, Shockley still spent over a decade unsuccessfully trying to get a FET to work (due to trapped charges which were not understood until the 50s).
This is partially why the experimentalists, Bardeen and Brattain, are quoted alongside Shockley as the inventors of the transistor, even though Shockley had come up with a lot of the theory years before.
America was very much against immigrants between about 1925 and 1965. If you look at the history of the US they needed immigrants to settle the land, before their expansion westward they were quite against immigration.
> America was very much against immigrants between about 1925 and 1965.
And still despite immigration reforms and national origin quotas, USA still accepted by far more immigrants during this time period than any other country.
Per capita far from (Australia and Canada, Israel, France, Taiwan, Switzerland , Belgium, Argentina...) on an absolute number sure because they were the most populous industrialized country. Even the latter you could argue against as west Germany had many after WW2 move from all over 'back to' Germany.
Not very. The missing macro is that during and after WWII, the US had the luxury of being the only intact industrial economy.
In this environment, Shockley, who himself was the child of an engineer and has been criticized as a eugenicist (ie. explicitly not welcoming outsiders, despite his father speaking eight languages, and being born in London), ran a Bell research lab and was exposed to a plurality of emergent military problems to which he applied physics.
After the war, and co-inventing the transistor (probably largely in response to this wartime experience), some of his ex employees including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore split off and started research under Fairchild.
Notably, this occurred right when chemistry was having its moment, and the US had huge postwar capacity to enable innovation. While total industrial production reached 247% of prewar levels during WWII, chemical production soared to 412%.
The group succeeded in 1960. Of the eight who left to found this novel research group, only two were immigrants. Six were educated at elite US universities like Caltech, MIT and Stanford.
> The missing macro is that during and after WWII, the US had the luxury of being the only intact industrial economy.
While true, this is generally overemphasized. The destruction of industry in other countries helped the postwar US, but the US didn't need that help to begin with to achieve an absurd lead over everyone else.
If we look at 1938, the US still has a higher GDP than Germany and the USSR (#2 and #3) combined. This is just before the war, so everyone has had over 20 years to recover, and they hadn't started bombing each other yet.
The US is massive, has cheap undeveloped land, natural resources, and easy transit (you have a massive river running down the center for barges, along with lots of flat runs for railroads). Compare with Europe, where space and resources are a constant problem, alongside tensions between countries wasting time.
The US was playing the industrial revolution on easy mode, in comparison to everyone else
> In this environment, Shockley, who himself was the child of an engineer and has been criticized as a eugenicist (ie. explicitly not welcoming outsiders, despite his father speaking eight languages, and being born in London), ran a Bell research lab and was exposed to a plurality of emergent military problems to which he applied physics.
Eugenics doesn't have anything in particular to say about whether outsiders should or should not be welcomed. It makes a set of scientific claims about how heredity affects people and a set of moral claims about how people should attempt to control these effects.
It's genuinely so ridiculous to suggest that freedom and meritocracy (among other things) were why America was able to do this first. This stuff was before the civil rights act.
There are endless stories about Americans being sent to Europe needing to be told that they can't treat black people the way they do at home.
All of the chest thumping about being the land of the free rings hollow when considering how recent some of this history is. The current and previous president were alive when the civil rights act was passed!
More because Europe had just spent half a decade murdering each other on a massive scale, and there wasn't much energy left for basic research for a little while after experiencing a couple dozen megadeaths and the various urban remodeling programs that accompanied them.
Europe has had many decades since then to innovate in technology and they have still not done so. They are almost completely dependent on American and Asian tech. And that is not changing anytime soon.
So yes, it had something to do with WWII, but that's not the only reason.
For instance, Japan and South Korea were both equally devastated and yet they both managed to build world class technology industries in the aftermath.
> Europe has had many decades since then to innovate in technology and they have still not done so. They are almost completely dependent on American and Asian tech. And that is not changing anytime soon.
You are stating that like this has been the state of things for a century. The dependence on American and Asian tech has been a gradual process, that accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s. Before that time, every European countries had their own tech industries able to compete with the tech giants (Nokia, Siemens, Grundig, Alcatel, Thomson, Olivetti, Philips, Ericsson, Amstrad and that's only citing a few of the ones that marked history forever, only in the field consumer electronics, a lot of them back in the day were competing but ended up fading away, and also others were everywhere in the tech industry before without being really exposed to consumers).
The actual valuable technology is the EUV light source tech developed in California by an American company that ASML acquired in 2013 under a strict technology export agreement with the US government. It was not developed in Europe.
The technology itself is researched and developed in San Diego. ASML in the Netherlands is just the assembler of the final machines. That's not the particularly valuable part of the product pipeline.
Doesn't seem ironic at all, when the website (as nearly all are) is fundamentally dependent on a technical stack invented by the United States government to be accessed.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. We were large enough that we could find the talent, and the country was free enough so that private industry could drive innovation. Low taxes let companies reinvest. We know this is what happened because the success of free markets isn't a mystery, it's well studied and documented.
This is really inaccurate. The real reason is similar to why America was at the forefront of the other high tech sectors like aviation etc too: massive defense spending, a lot of business people (like Fairchild) willing to invest in a sector where they see the potential procurement from Pentagon, while starting to serve the civilian sector.
This is very true.
The origin of the semiconductor industry of USA is in the WWII military research for microwave detectors used in radars.
The vacuum diodes were no longer useful at such high frequencies, so it was attempted to make better point-contact semiconductor diodes using germanium and silicon pure crystals, instead of using natural minerals, like galena, which had poor performance and were not reproducible.
Much of this WWII research and development effort has been done at the Bell labs. The most important results were the development of technologies for purifying germanium and silicon at levels never succeeded before for other chemical substances, for growing single crystals of Ge and Si, and for doping them in a controlled way with impurities.
Before WWII, all attempts to make semiconductor devices with good performances were unsuccessful, with the exception of a few applications that had very low performance requirements, like the AC rectifiers with selenium or copper oxide. The reason is that the properties of semiconductors are hugely influenced by even very small amounts of impurities or crystal defects.
Only by the end of WWII, with the availability of pure single crystals of germanium and silicon, which were the result of radar development during the war, the research on semiconductor devices could really start.
The experimental discovery of the point-contact transistor by Bardeen and Brattain was a direct product of the Bell team trying to find other applications for the technology of making point-contact diodes that was developed at Bell during the war. Then, stimulated by the experimental results, Shockley, who was an excellent theoretical physicist, developed a theory of the electrical conduction in semiconductors that has been the basis for the invention of the other semiconductor devices during the following decades. Shockley himself has invented several semiconductor devices using his theory, the very important BJT (bipolar junction transistor) and JFET (junction field-effect transistor) and the less important PNPN diode (a.k.a. Shockley diode).
The announcement of the transistor, which was "open-sourced" by the Bell Labs triggered intense efforts of R&D in semiconductor devices at many companies in USA and all over the world.
The very quick evolution of the semiconductor industry in USA and abroad during the first decades was determined by a complete disregard for what nowadays is called "IP".
ATT and the Bell Labs licensed the semiconductor technology cheaply to anyone and even gave it for free for certain purposes (e.g. for the purpose of making hearing aids, respecting the wishes of Alexander Graham Bell, the founder of ATT).
Then, in the following years, all advances in semiconductor devices and semiconductor technology were published with complete recipes of how to reproduce them. This ensured that all innovations spread immediately to all companies active in this domain. While significant inventions were patented, at that time patents were typically still licensed fairly and non-discriminatory, instead of being used as weapons against competitors.
The semiconductor and computer industries would have never flourished and something like the Silicon Valley would have never been created in the current environment of secrecy and paranoia about "protecting IP" and of abusing the patent and copyright laws to prevent competition and reach monopoly status.
To be fair, not protecting "IP" was the right strategy when the market for the semiconductor industry was growing, because the sharing of all knowledge ensured a much faster growth of the market, which was achieved both by replacing older technologies and by creating new applications enabled by the properties of the new devices. The growth of the market ensured that sharing was a win for each company.
In a stagnant market, a company can grow only if another shrinks, so a much more adversarial attitude is needed if growth is the goal, like weaponizing the "IP".
I love the talk! But I do feel something critical is missing. You can not talk about semi-conductors without at least mentioning Walter Schottky (but I think that doesn't fit the narrative because he was a German).
Watched some of the video. The connection between "freedom of speech" and "shoddy logic" is that Shockley invented the transistor despite being a raging racist. This was the best supported argument of the bunch.
It's an interesting point about that time in history, but I still don't buy the argument. Does it hold up when looking at which countries lead the world in semiconductor manufacturing today?
The bit about how semiconductors could only have been made in America because only America had the specific combination of freedom of speech, irreverence, pragmatism over dogmatism, meritocracy and welcoming outsiders is definitely an interesting idea, although how true that is?
Considering two Germans in Paris independently discovered the transistor just a few months after Shockley's team, this seems like a self-serving fantasy: https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/the-european-t...
There's no question in my mind that American industry and capital markets were far better at pivoting to this new industry though.
If you have a diode, then the transistor is only a small step away.
Semiconductor physics books require you to work through a lot of material until you understand the diode, and then the bipolar transistor is just one next chapter.
> If you have a diode, then the transistor is only a small step away.
It is not. We've had semiconductor diodes since 1874, but it took many decades to develop the solid state physics to understand how they worked and how to extend them. Crucially, you need some understanding of quantum theory (energy levels, Fermi distributions, etc), which was not developed until the 20s and 30s.
Even after they had the physics down, Shockley still spent over a decade unsuccessfully trying to get a FET to work (due to trapped charges which were not understood until the 50s). This is partially why the experimentalists, Bardeen and Brattain, are quoted alongside Shockley as the inventors of the transistor, even though Shockley had come up with a lot of the theory years before.
[dead]
America was very much against immigrants between about 1925 and 1965. If you look at the history of the US they needed immigrants to settle the land, before their expansion westward they were quite against immigration.
> America was very much against immigrants between about 1925 and 1965.
And still despite immigration reforms and national origin quotas, USA still accepted by far more immigrants during this time period than any other country.
Per capita far from (Australia and Canada, Israel, France, Taiwan, Switzerland , Belgium, Argentina...) on an absolute number sure because they were the most populous industrialized country. Even the latter you could argue against as west Germany had many after WW2 move from all over 'back to' Germany.
Because there was a difference between what the PEOPLE wanted and what the ELITES wanted.
The railroad barron needed cheap labour and didn't give a flying fuck about the KKK clowns marching in Washington.
This has always been the case all throughout modern history though
The elites always want cheaper labor, while the existing domestic workforce usually opposes such measures (as it obviously devalues their labor)
Not very. The missing macro is that during and after WWII, the US had the luxury of being the only intact industrial economy.
In this environment, Shockley, who himself was the child of an engineer and has been criticized as a eugenicist (ie. explicitly not welcoming outsiders, despite his father speaking eight languages, and being born in London), ran a Bell research lab and was exposed to a plurality of emergent military problems to which he applied physics.
After the war, and co-inventing the transistor (probably largely in response to this wartime experience), some of his ex employees including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore split off and started research under Fairchild.
Notably, this occurred right when chemistry was having its moment, and the US had huge postwar capacity to enable innovation. While total industrial production reached 247% of prewar levels during WWII, chemical production soared to 412%.
The group succeeded in 1960. Of the eight who left to found this novel research group, only two were immigrants. Six were educated at elite US universities like Caltech, MIT and Stanford.
> The missing macro is that during and after WWII, the US had the luxury of being the only intact industrial economy.
While true, this is generally overemphasized. The destruction of industry in other countries helped the postwar US, but the US didn't need that help to begin with to achieve an absurd lead over everyone else.
If we look at 1938, the US still has a higher GDP than Germany and the USSR (#2 and #3) combined. This is just before the war, so everyone has had over 20 years to recover, and they hadn't started bombing each other yet.
Stats based on: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334182/wwii-pre-war-gdp...
The US is massive, has cheap undeveloped land, natural resources, and easy transit (you have a massive river running down the center for barges, along with lots of flat runs for railroads). Compare with Europe, where space and resources are a constant problem, alongside tensions between countries wasting time.
The US was playing the industrial revolution on easy mode, in comparison to everyone else
> In this environment, Shockley, who himself was the child of an engineer and has been criticized as a eugenicist (ie. explicitly not welcoming outsiders, despite his father speaking eight languages, and being born in London), ran a Bell research lab and was exposed to a plurality of emergent military problems to which he applied physics.
Eugenics doesn't have anything in particular to say about whether outsiders should or should not be welcomed. It makes a set of scientific claims about how heredity affects people and a set of moral claims about how people should attempt to control these effects.
How semiconductors were made in the USA
[dead]
It's genuinely so ridiculous to suggest that freedom and meritocracy (among other things) were why America was able to do this first. This stuff was before the civil rights act.
There are endless stories about Americans being sent to Europe needing to be told that they can't treat black people the way they do at home.
All of the chest thumping about being the land of the free rings hollow when considering how recent some of this history is. The current and previous president were alive when the civil rights act was passed!
[dead]
All the key people in CS, EE, and Physics needed to invent transistors where in America at the time.
Why? Mostly because America has true individual freedom and low taxes, unlike Europe.
More because Europe had just spent half a decade murdering each other on a massive scale, and there wasn't much energy left for basic research for a little while after experiencing a couple dozen megadeaths and the various urban remodeling programs that accompanied them.
Europe has had many decades since then to innovate in technology and they have still not done so. They are almost completely dependent on American and Asian tech. And that is not changing anytime soon.
So yes, it had something to do with WWII, but that's not the only reason.
For instance, Japan and South Korea were both equally devastated and yet they both managed to build world class technology industries in the aftermath.
> Europe has had many decades since then to innovate in technology and they have still not done so. They are almost completely dependent on American and Asian tech. And that is not changing anytime soon.
You are stating that like this has been the state of things for a century. The dependence on American and Asian tech has been a gradual process, that accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s. Before that time, every European countries had their own tech industries able to compete with the tech giants (Nokia, Siemens, Grundig, Alcatel, Thomson, Olivetti, Philips, Ericsson, Amstrad and that's only citing a few of the ones that marked history forever, only in the field consumer electronics, a lot of them back in the day were competing but ended up fading away, and also others were everywhere in the tech industry before without being really exposed to consumers).
*rolls eyes*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML
The actual valuable technology is the EUV light source tech developed in California by an American company that ASML acquired in 2013 under a strict technology export agreement with the US government. It was not developed in Europe.
[1] https://www.cymer.com/
[2] https://www.asml.com/en/company/about-asml/cymer
Yet the US is unable to actually build those machines (neither can Korea, Japan or Taiwan - apparently China will soon)
The technology itself is researched and developed in San Diego. ASML in the Netherlands is just the assembler of the final machines. That's not the particularly valuable part of the product pipeline.
I guess you're more of an "idea guy" right? ;)
The irony of making this post on a web site is quite amazing.
Doesn't seem ironic at all, when the website (as nearly all are) is fundamentally dependent on a technical stack invented by the United States government to be accessed.
The claim is not just dependency, but a failure to innovate at all.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. We were large enough that we could find the talent, and the country was free enough so that private industry could drive innovation. Low taxes let companies reinvest. We know this is what happened because the success of free markets isn't a mystery, it's well studied and documented.