Just about everything in this post is from Chip Wars by Chris Miller, some are direct quotes, others are paraphrases. A few things are my own, but they’re pretty obvious.
Even though I was vitally interested in computers as a neurologist starting in the early 70s and got one as soon as I could afford it (an Alpha Micro which I really couldn’t), Chip Wars covering the early history of silicon based computers taught me a lot. It starts with Shockley’s invention of the transistor in 1948 and goes from there. I won’t try to summarize that, but if you want an extremely well written early history of the period, read this book. It isn’t dry and the personalities of the main characters are well fleshed out.
What I didn’t realize was just how much of the early development of silicon computers was driven by the military. In particular Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a lot of academics and their research into computation. Today every chip company uses tools from one of 3 chip design companies founded and built by graduates of DARPA programs
Guided munitions during the early Vietnam war used vacuum tubes that were hand soldered (Sparrow III) they broke down 2/3 of the time only 10% hit their target. Bombs fell 420 feet from target. Some 800 bombs had tried to take out a bridge in Vietnam and failed. A set of wings was added to direct the bomb’s flight along with a laser guidance system which worked as follows. A small silicon wafer was divided into 4 quadrants and placed behind a lens. The laser reflecting off the target would shine through the lens onto the silicon,. If the bomb veered off course one quadrant would receive more of the laser’s energy than the others and circuits would move the wings to reorient the bomb’s trajectory so the laser was shining straight through the lens. A simple laser sensor and a few transistors made the bomb accurate. This was 1972. Spoiler alert — we still lost.
Photolithography is a crucial technology for drawing circuits on silicon, and it is mentioned many times throughout the book. It’s basically a simple idea— turning a microscope lens upside down to make something big look smaller. It was initiated by Lathrop at Texas Instruments in 1958 It took thousands of experiments and a lot of interaction with suppliers etc to make it work. There will be much more about photolithography in the next posts.
When owning a copy machine was a crime and no one without security clearance could use a computer, Russia had no way to educate a truly huge number of computer programmers. So they basically used espionage to copy our technology.
This didn’t work. The Soviet copy it strategy was flawed, because they couldn’t scale up the manufacturing process reliably, something Grove at Intel and Chang at Texas Instruments fixated on and spent countless hours improving. Moreover the US had access to technology in optics, chemistry purified materials. They knew the temperature at which chemicals needed to be heated or how long photoresist should be exposed to light. Every step of the process of making chips involved specialized knowledge that was rarely shared outside a specific company — often not written down. So it couldn’t be stolen.
The copy it strategy left the Russians 5 years behind.
Russia’s defense chief of staff Ogarkov knew this and said in ’83 to Leslie Gelb “The Cold War is over and you have won”. Interestingly, Star Wars begun the same year is nowhere mentioned in the book. It was derided as implausible, but the Russians knew they couldn’t match it.
Things haven’t changed much in Russia. p335
Chemiotics II 