Quotes About Innovation

Most of the world's GDP is produced with devices that rely on semiconductors. For a product that didn't exist seventy-five years ago, this is an extraordinary

TSMC builds almost all the world's most advanced processor chips.

The design is carved into silicon using some of the world's most precise machinery

But pilots who used these bombs knew just how transformative they were.

Advanced microelectronics and a set of wings strapped to a bomb had transformed the nature of military power.

Gorbachev made no secret of why he chose to visit California's Bay Area. "The ideas and technologies of tomorrow are born here in California," he declared in a speech at Stanford.

However, the connections between vacuum tubes could be reorganized, enabling the computer to run different calculations.

Since the 1980s, Intel has specialized in a type of chip called a CPU, a central processing unit, of which a microprocessor in a PC is one example. These are the chips that serve as the "brain" in a computer or data center. They are general-purpose workhorses, equally capable of opening a web browser or running Microsoft Excel. They can conduct many different types of calculations, which makes them versatile, but they do these calculations serially, one after another.

unless scientists could find a smaller, faster, cheaper switch.

A crucial ingredient in TSMC's early success was deep ties with the U.S. chip industry.

Intel's first problem was artificial intelligence.

Morris Chang hired Don Brooks, another former Texas Instruments executive, to work as

Newspaper Guangming Ribao set the tone, calling on readers in 1985 to abandon "the formula of 'the first machine imported, the second machine imported, and the third machine imported' " and replace it with " 'the first machine imported, the second made in China, and the third machine exported.

In the chip industry, by lowering startup costs, Chang's foundry model gave birth to dozens of new "authors"—fabless chip design firms—that transformed the tech sector by putting computing power in all sorts of devices.

Bell Labs soon began arranging patent applications for this new device.

Shockley was furious that his colleagues had discovered an experiment to prove his theories, and he was committed

a then-unknown engineer named Ren Zhengfei established an electronics trading company called Huawei.

new type of transistor, made up of three chunks of semiconductor material.

He could turn the larger current on and off by manipulating the small current applied to the middle of this transistor sandwich.

he wondered how to reduce the number of wires that were needed to string different transistors together. Rather than use a separate piece of silicon or germanium to build each

he thought of assembling multiple components on the same piece of semiconductor

Bob Noyce, the leader of the "traitorous eight," who had a charismatic, visionary enthusiasm for microelectronics and an intuitive sense of which technical advances were needed to make transistors tiny, cheap, and

miniaturization and electric efficiency were a powerful combination:

The chip industry faced an organized assault by the world's second-largest economy and the one-party state that ruled it.