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

by Chris Miller

Spying could only get Shokin and his engineers so far. Simply stealing a chip didn’t explain how it was made, just as stealing a cake can’t explain how it was baked. The recipe for chips was already extraordinarily complicated. Foreign exchange students studying with Shockley at Stanford could become smart physicists, but it was engineers like Andy Grove or Mary Anne Potter who knew at what temperature certain chemicals needed to be heated, or how long photoresists should be exposed to light. Every step of the process of making chips involved specialized knowledge that was rarely shared outside of a specific company. This type of know-how was often not even written down. Soviet spies were among the best in the business, but the semiconductor production process required more details and knowledge than even the most capable agent could steal. Moreover, the cutting edge was constantly changing, per the rate set out in Moore’s Law. Even if the Soviets managed to copy a design, acquire the materials and machinery, and replicate the production process, this took time. TI and Fairchild were introducing new designs with more transistors every year. By the mid-1960s, the earliest integrated circuits were old news, too big and power-hungry to be very valuable. Compared to almost any other type of technology, semiconductor technology was racing forward. The size of transistors and their energy consumption was shrinking, while the computing power that could be packed on a square inch ...