Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor

摘要

During the past few decades, scholars have been steadily building an edifice of works on the history of the semiconductor technology—the material culture of what is widely identified as the information age. An early effort was Ernst Braun and Stuart MacDonald's 1978 brief survey Revolution in Miniature, on the history and impact of semiconductor electronics. In 1992 Braun, Lillian Hoddeson, and others published Out of the Crystal Maze, a volume of scholarly essays about the origins of solid-state physics, the sci-entific roots that flowered during the second quarter of the twentieth cen-tury. More recent works have focused on specific devices or technologies— for example, Crystal Fire, a 1997 book I coauthored with Hoddeson on the transistor's invention and development, and Ross Bassett's To the Digital Age, on the rise of metal-oxide semiconductor technology. And biographies have been written about transistor inventors John Bardeen and William Shockley, as well as microchip pioneer Robert Noyce.