Numerous books have been written about the key founders of the semiconductor industry, about the early companies, the reasons for their success and failures, on the star products, and the men behind them.

In conversations with the Computer History Museum (CHM) of Mountain View, California, the two authors, veterans of semiconductor manufacturing organizations, found that the history of semiconductor process development has been treated as an ancillary issue in top down discussions of what drove the extraordinary growth of this industry. We tell the story from a bottom-up point of view of wafer fab operation managers, which we were for many years. We narrate the extraordinary contributions from all team members of these wafer fab organizations: hourly operators, supervisors, maintenance technicians, as well as the creative scientists and engineers that created and managed the companies we profile.

We concentrate on the dramatic improvements in manufacturing productivity in the main MOS technologies, which eventually all merged into very similar CMOS processes. We concentrate on the time period from 1957 (Fairchild founding) to the end of the last century, when much of the technology development migrated to foundry operations overseas. We tried to exercise great care to be fair in assessing the contributions of the various companies to the overall progress of the industry.

In this spirit, we also recognize the huge contributions made by the semiconductor equipment companies, and their key engineers to the success of process development and production organizations.

While basing the story of process developments on historical facts, with the help of the large document and library resources available, including those of the CHM, we also tell the extraordinary human experience of working with the early wafer fab teams, with the process architecture breakthroughs pioneers, and all other wafer fab workers. To this end we also interviewed many key contributors to these process and equipment breakthroughs that made the rapid advancements in the semiconductor technologies possible.

Dag

Dear Friends,

The book Marshall Wilder and I have been talking about with you, for some time, and to which many of you offered valuable contributions, is out!

Its title is The Microchip Revolution, A Brief History.

It is available from KDP-Amazon, the link to it is: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GCYX4LF. Or you can go to the website Books at Amazon.com, there will be a window at the top off the page, and you type the book title and you get it.

Many of you at CHM were instrumental in getting this project done, both in offering access to your numerous library ressources and introducing us to people we did not know and with your constant encouragements. You encouraged us to write a book about the history of semiconductor technology, more than two and half years ago. It starts in the late 1950s and goes through the remainder of the century, with an epilogue that takes us to the present day. We cover the amazing technical issues that had to be solved to allow the state of the art to progress from one transistor to 10 Billion that is the norm for modern integrated circuits like the Apple 12X processor. We tell the stories of the people and companies that were involved, by focusing on nine companies that we were involved with or were most significant in the Microchip Revolution: Fairchild, Hughes, Intersil, Eurosil, Intel, AMD, IDT, Cypress and Micron.

We hope you are going to enjoy the stories we relate, and if so, please tell your friends, and give us a favorable review on Amazon.

Thank you again for your contributions and your heart warming help!

Luc-Olivier Bauer

+ 1 949 547 9174

PS: here is a 3D rendition of our book