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

by Chris Miller

It was only sixty years ago that the number of transistors on a cutting-edge chip wasn’t 11.8 billion, but 4. In 1961, south of San Francisco, a small firm called Fairchild Semiconductor announced a new product called the Micrologic, a silicon chip with four transistors embedded in it. Soon the company devised ways to put a dozen transistors on a chip, then a hundred. Fairchild cofounder Gordon Moore noticed in 1965 that the number of components that could be fit on each chip was doubling annually as engineers learned to fabricate ever smaller transistors. This prediction—that the computing power of chips would grow exponentially—came to be called “Moore’s Law” and led Moore to predict the invention of devices that in 1965 seemed impossibly futuristic, like an “electronic wristwatch,” “home computers,” and even “personal portable communications equipment.”