The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

by T.R. Reid

Book Overview

Barely fifty years ago a computer was a gargantuan, vastly expensive thing that only a handful of scientists had ever seen. The world's brightest engineers were stymied in their quest to make these machines small and affordable until the solution finally came from two ingenious young Americans. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce hit upon the stunning discovery that would make possible the silicon microchip, a work that would ultimately earn Kilby the Nobel...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375758283
• ISBN13: 9780375758287
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Random House Trade
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

an excellent book

Reid balances the general narrative with the "drilling down" into details with virtuosity. You brain will love the way he lays the information out. You'll never get bored throughout the book. The author successfully reverse-engineers the story of electronics all the way down to a vacuum tube. Read this book yourself and read it to your kids. Vicki

A Classic

More than the history of the inventors and invention of the integrated circuit, this book presents the history of the events leading up to the invention. I'm an engineer with 20+ years experience, and I now have an appreciation of the people involved in the inventions that shaped our modern world, and a deeper appreciation for the inventions too.This classic now has an honored place on my bookshelf next to:- Physics, An Ebb and Flow of Ideas- A Tour of the Calculus- Sugar Blues- Man's Own Show: Civilization- The Art of ElectronicsWell worth reading and owning. Next up, I'll read "Fire in the Valley" which looks like it may also be a keeper.

A dumies guide to the history of modern electronics

I found this book to be helpful and informative. It does a good job of explaining the Ideas, thoughts, history, and science behind one of today greatest enigmas the micro chip. Things like why did we have to switch to integrated circuits? Who came up with the idea? I found it to be an excelent source on the co-inventors Kilby and Noyce. The author does a good job of making the history lessons engaging. Few people have even the slightest idea what really goes on in the electronic devices we take for granted. This books goes a long way toward filling that gap of knowledge, and I encourage any one that is even slightly curious to read it.

Couldn't put it down - Real American Heroes.

Technophobes might as well move on to the next review. I loved this book. It explained in clear, precise language how innumerable barriers were overcome by innovative and insightfully brilliant individuals to create a device that revolutionized our lives. I've always been fascinated by electronics, built my own radios and earned an amateur radio license in 7th grade, just because the subject and theory of how electrons move around to perform useful functions is intriguing. Reid has captured much of that fascination and translated it into a great story. Before integrated circuits could be produced, the transistor had to be invented. Before that time, switching mechanism, required a vacuum tube to control, amplify and switch the flow of electrons through a circuit. It was the discovery that some semiconductor materials could be doped to have an excess of positive charges or negative charges that provided the breakthrough. A strip of germanium could be doped at each end with differing charges leaving a junction in the middle. The junction worked like a turnstile that could control the flow of current when connected to a battery. Variations in current across these junctions connected in the transistor formation could rectify (prevent current from flowing in both directions) and amplify. That's all that's needed to make a radio (I'm oversimplifying obviously) and hundreds of other devices. Transistors required vastly less current than vacuum tubes, were almost infinitely stable, were cheap and gave off little heat. But, transistors required thousands of connections to the wires coming in order to make a useful circuit, and as demands for more complex circuitry arose the wiring became infinitely complex. This interconnection problem became a huge barrier that could have prevented the effective utilization of the advantages of the transistor"You read everything. . . You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful," remembers Jack Kilby, one of the inventors of the integrated circuit. He also insists that he is not a scientist but an engineer. "A scientist is motivated by knowledge; he basically wants to explain something. An engineer's drive is to solve problems, to make something work. . . . Reid has elegantly interwoven the biographies of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. One of the delights of the book was learning how the two inventors thought, how they proceeded, and why they went in the directions they did. Robert Noyce, founder of Intel, had developed a process to make transistors in arrays on a silicon wafer. They cut apart the transistors and then hired "thousands of women with tweezers to pick them up and try to wire them together. It just seemed so stupid." He, too, realized the tyranny of interconnection numbers. What they both came up with was the "Monolithic Idea." The notion that an entire circuit could be designed and produced on those silicon chips. Obviously

It takes a polymath to know a polymath

I am referring to Mr. T. R. Reid. His book, The Chip, is a tour de force that takes the reader on a journey at once historical and cerebral-, even spiritual. This absorbing account of the mircoelectronics revolution integrates (among other subjects): the biographies of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, the counting systems of ancient Babylonians and Myans, the arcane ideas of 19th century mathematician George Boole, solid state physics, statistics, politics, patent law, and an Alice story. Reid interconnects people and ideas from varied disciplines as elegantly as the silcon chip integrates the varied components of the electronic circuit. So The Chip is both an exposition of a type of physical integration and itself a demonstration of another, a more general type of the thing it describes. Readers from diverse backgrounds should be stimulated on one or more levels by The Chip. I sincerely hope the book could find its way on the required reading list of High Schools across the country. For this book is about America and for America, weaving together larger themes of individualism, optimism, innovation, amelioration, and, most of all, wonder. It is at once guidebook and soul food, leading, nurturing, sustaining..., lighting up the fires of the creative imagination. So follow this torchlight of a review and pass into the rich and dazzling realm of The Chip.