Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

At an industry conference in the late 1970s, where GCA was advertising its systems for chipmakers, Texas Instruments’ Morris Chang walked up to the GCA booth, started looking at the company’s equipment, and inquired whether, rather than scanning light across the length of a wafer, the firm’s equipment could move step-by-step, exposing each chip on the silicon wafer. Such a “stepper” would be far more accurate than the existing scanners. Though a stepper had never been devised, GCA’s engineers believed they could create one, providing higher-resolution imaging and thus smaller transistors. Several years later, in 1978, GCA introduced its first stepper. Sales orders began rolling in. Before the stepper, GCA had never made more than $50 million a year in revenue on its military contracts, but now it had a monopoly on an extraordinarily valuable machine. Revenue soon hit $300 million and the company’s stock price surged. As Japan’s chip industry rose, however, GCA began to lose its edge.