Solar panels. Now, DeepSeek has become a star. Semiconductor companies, each local government wants to have their own national champion.So implicitly technology was part of the yardstick competition as well.
Then you have the cloud computing platforms. Semiconductors -- incredibly, incredibly high capex.
Think of having ASML. So this is the Dutch lithography firm, okay? They produce advanced machines for semiconductors . They have US suppliers and they have Chinese customers.And if you think of them as a private enterprise, think of zed as a vector of all the aggregates, all of the state
But on the 3rd of May I heard from somebody called Lee Smith at advancedRISCMachines.co.uk. National Semiconductor used to be a firm.
She previously was a communications specialist and reach and relevance external relations manager at McKinsey, where she represented McKinsey's global semiconductor practice. But more recently, she founded a nonprofit organization called the Leaders Forum that helps, in particular, Asian leaders make the transition from government into private practice and vice versa.
trajectory matters and it's almost never considered there's also those of you in the semiconductor business understand that each generation of silicon has a declining cost and then new generations can come along start a new declining curve lot
coming out. And then helium is absolutely critical for the semiconductor industry. It didn't matter 100 years ago. And semiconductors are important for what? Everything. I mean you you know your you take the semiconductors out of that, you've got a brick. Okay. The the the
But as far as I know, when you're developing electronics, there's conductors and superconductors and semiconductors , so that the current can flow in an effective way to fulfill the purpose of that device without overheating, without conflict between the different components.
He got a group together at Bell Labs, put Shockley in charge, and asked them to look into the nature of semiconductors . And semiconductors were relatively new, I guess you could say, semi-understood material at the time. They had become very valuable in war-time radar.
Though Taiwan does have its own economic bargaining chip. It's home to the company TSMC, which manufactured over 90% of the world's semiconductor chips in 2024. So Taiwan, in other words, is economically just as important to the United States
And it's a molecular microchip. So this is a semiconductor chip that's smaller than a fingernail. And it can grab an individual molecule, and it can read it.
Actually, quite surprisingly, it's not for this particle to be found in some huge accelerators, but it could be in a tabletop kind of experiment very much like a semiconductor device people will usually use. So it's a material called a topological insulator-- Diane already mentioned introduction-- something I discovered 10 years ago.
Now, let's jump back another technology generation to think this through a little bit more. So this is a semiconductor . This is the technology that's underlying your computer.
If you look at Apple's S1 at their IPO, almost every single senior exec plus, their funders all had ties through Markkula to the semiconductor industry. Not the case for Sandy Kurtzig.
"In 1971, a hard drinking reporter named Don Hoefler published a three-part history of the men, money, and litigation behind the semiconductor business. He titled the series, which appeared in an industry newsletter called Electronic News, 'Silicon Valley, USA.' It was the first formal use of a name that had,
They were watching the television. And the semiconductor industry, sort of in the backdrop, plays a very big part in a lot of these companies.
from immigrant backgrounds, if they're people of color or women? I was in the semiconductor business and semiconductors was a great industry in the '90s and then it almost died.
And this was a semiconductor company, primarily men.
who form Fairchild Semiconductor , and then eventually form Intel.
But Kelly and others at Bell Labs felt that there was still a good deal amount to know about them that they did not. And the semiconductor group was interesting for a couple of reasons. It sounds a little bit obvious today, but it was tremendously interdisciplinary, which Kelly personally believed was necessary.
Pioneer of the semiconductor industry who wrote an article little noticed at the time that coined a term in the
It dealt mainly with semiconductors and suddenly the main application for semiconductors became the personal computer.
supply gets back to normal." and he explained you can't stockpile helium because it leaks through containers. Y so once supply is cut off semiconductor production will stop entirely. South Korea gets 65% of its helium from Qatar in that region and makes 2/3 of the world's memory chips. Their government
They were watching the television. So the first one was Fairchild Semiconductor , which was just this incredible compression of brilliance.
They were watching the television. I think that something that the semiconductor industry couldn't help with was figuring out how to sell to consumers.
There's a problem in semiconductor processing today, and it's this thing called CTE mismatch, or the Coefficient of Thermal Expansion mismatch.
He goes off and he forms Shockley Semiconductor , and he gets more and more uncollaborative with his team, and more and more top down dictatorial,
Why was it called Fairchild Semiconductor ?
I'll make you a Fairchild Semiconductor division.
I've been in the semiconductor industry a long time.
And she found her own job bonding semiconductors .
I got thrown into covering semiconductors and networking equipment.
quantum effects and scale effects of semiconductors to know that the price would come down. But they had to make a bet. They had to make the bet that the price would come down by 99 percent.
But then there's also Amazon. How many of us knew that Amazon actually produces its own semiconductor chips? They're called Trainium. And they're competing with the likes of Nvidia and Google and AMD.
But she found that the elements that were-- the semiconductor materials were-- a little bit similar to each other.
But on the 3rd of May I heard from somebody called Lee Smith at advancedRISCMachines.co.uk. I thought I was honestly visiting the National Semiconductor of America.
Years would pass before the name Silicon Valley gained widespread use." And it's actually really funny all the other names that people came up with-- it was Silicon Gulch, Semiconductor Country. Semiconductor Country is pretty good. "In the early 1970s, Silicon Valley startup companies were largely deemed irrelevant to the real business of the United States, which was concentrated in East Coast
They were watching the television. What was it about the early experience in the semiconductor industry that set these individuals up
And the first time I went into venture, I said, oh, I'll just look at all the variables about what makes a company successful. So I spent a bunch of time collecting data on actually semiconductor companies over a decade. And I would record I think I had maybe 40 variables per company and then I did some simple regression
from immigrant backgrounds, if they're people of color or women? All the venture firms in the Valley were funding semiconductor companies and now nobody funds semiconductor companies, right?
And they tucked it into I think it was the Semiconductor Chip Act.
I mean you think about the information revolution being powered by semiconductor . On their own computers, don't do anything.
systems in particular that might suggest how the semiconductor is going to design a new legal system for us in our digital lives.
as electronic, and semiconductor technologies and any others that you can think of.
everything. Everything electronic. If you need semiconductors , you need helium. So if you cut off 30% of the world's helium supply, you cut off the capacity to produce 30% of the world's semiconductors . And Iran have blocked that gap.
And so she did a little bit of research on semiconductors .
And you mentioned lasers, semiconductors , and the physics of formation of galaxies.
We think of it as OK, it drops the cost in something. It used to be expensive-- something-- and then semiconductors came along and computers came along and that thing became cheap. And so what does your computer really do?
from immigrant backgrounds, if they're people of color or women? So I thought I would never work in semiconductors again and the last company we did was in semiconductors .
government in for instance fostering the development of semiconductors of the computer of the internet and an