Silicon and the Economy

The semiconductor industry is the largest economic segment of the US economy. We still dominate in a few areas. Semiconductor equipment, hard disk drives, computers as finished products, laser printers and inkjets are some of the product areas where American companies continue to dominate. And a lot of the innovation that drives technology originates in the US. Read more

Silicon, the Final Frontier (2)

When you consider the technical issues of making semiconductors, it seems impossibly difficult. Semiconductor fabrication requires lithographic processes to create features that are measured fractions of an Angstrom, the unit of measure of wavelengths of light. Pretty small. The least contamination or vibration that isn’t supposed to be there can ruin parts.

Wafer polishing machines must polish the slices of silicon to a flatness and perfection that can’t be measured by conventional means. Multi-axis robots handle silicon wafers in vacuum chambers without putting the tiniest scratch on the surface. Wafer cassettes with $250 to $500K worth of uncut chips have to be shuttled from process machine to process machine inspected and tested for defects. Read more

Silicon, the Final Frontier

It used to be said that what’s good for Detroit is good for America.  This idiom referred to the dominant role of the automotive manufacturing in the American economy.  During the boom of the 1950’s and 60’s many controls companies grew into their current positions as dominant controls suppliers by developing ever more powerful solutions for automating the auto makers.

It is somewhat ironic that as we move into the e-tainment era of the 2010’s, surrounded by e-media delivered by ever more powerful portable electronics, that the US semiconductor industry is at least the size of, and by some accounts, a much larger enterprise than the auto industry.   The Department of Commerce shows semiconductor manufacturing at $90B for 2002 and computer manufacturing at about $88B, some of which of course is overlapping.  If you start adding all the flat screen display, cellphones, well, you get the picture.  Semiconductors enable so many products that we take for granted, it is hard to estimate the impact. Read more