Quotes About Technology

Lynn Conway, a computer architect at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where the concept of the personal computer with a mouse and a keyboard was just then being invented.

they began discussing how to standardize chip design. Why couldn't you program a machine to design circuits, they wondered. "Once you can write a program to do something," Mead declared, "you don't need anybody's tool kit, you write your own.

China as the central challenge, condemning "unfair trade practices and massive, non-market-based state intervention" and cited "new attempts by China to acquire companies and technology based on their government's interest—not commercial objectives

paving the way for computer programs to automate chip design.

globalization" of chip fabrication hadn't occurred; "Taiwanization

Intel decided to focus on memory chips, where mass production would produce economies of scale.

Helping companies and professors keep Moore's Law alive, DARPA reasoned, was crucial to America's military edge.

the U.S. barred Huawei from buying advanced computer chips made with U.S. technology. Soon, the company's global expansion ground to a halt.

built by alumni of these DARPA- and SRC-funded programs.

China now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends

Qualcomm—quality communications—betting that ever-more-powerful microprocessors would let them stuff more signals into existing spectrum bandwidth. Jacobs

Semiconductors weren't simply the "cornerstone" of "everything we're competing on," as one administration official had put it. They could also be a devastatingly powerful weapon.

We rarely think about chips, yet they've created the modern world.

produced more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history. Nothing else comes close.

there's now a new instruction set architecture called RISC-V that is open-sourced, so it's available to anyone without a fee.

This was a leap forward in computing—or it would have been, if not for the moths. Because vacuum tubes glowed like lightbulbs, they attracted insects, requiring regular "debugging" by their engineers. Also like lightbulbs, vacuum tubes often burned

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

Integrated circuits made up 15 percent of South Korea's exports in 2017; 17 percent of Singapore's; 19 percent of Malaysia's; 21 percent of the Philippines'; and 36 percent of Taiwan's. Made in China 2025 called all this into question. At stake was the world's most dense network of supply chains and trade flows, the electronics industries that had undergirded Asia's economic growth and political stability over the past half century.

the chip is packaged and tested, often in Southeast Asia, before being sent to China for assembly into a phone or computer.

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.

the world produced more chips in 2021 than ever before—over 1.1 trillion semiconductor devices, according to research firm IC Insights. This was a 13 percent increase compared to 2020. The semiconductor shortage is mostly a story of demand growth rather than supply issues.