His undoing was a technology known as gallium arsenide, a potential replacement for silicon chips. Gallium arsenide chips were costly to make and the manufacturing base was still nascent, but compared with silicon, these new chips would be faster and more efficient and have properties, such as hardening against radiation, that made them particularly attractive to the military. DARPA had funded gallium arsenide in the past, but Fields wanted to use the technology as a test case for his ideas about supporting industry: DARPA, he decided, should invest in a gallium arsenide firm.
