From the 50s to the 60s of the 20th century, the United States and the Soviet Union fought for chips, and the United States was invincible.
With the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the confrontation between the two camps of the East and the West was born, looking back at the history of semiconductor competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union has been catching up, and as time goes by, the gap is getting wider and wider, which is worthy of our reflection.
The birth of transistors in the laboratory is of great historical significance for the development of semiconductors, but at this time the electron tube is still the mainstream, the transistor has strict technical requirements, and the cost is high relative to the electron tube.
As one of the inventors of the transistor, Shockley wanted to become a giant in business. In 1955, Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, a suburb of San Francisco, California, where his elderly mother lived in Palo Alto, not far from the company.
In 1957, eight young engineers led by Bob Noyce resigned collectively because they were extremely dissatisfied with Shockley's management and switched to Fairchild Semiconductor, a subsidiary established by Fairchild, which was the famous "eight defections" incident in the history of semiconductors, which also opened the magnificent history of the development of the semiconductor industry with Silicon Valley as the core.
Since then, Shockley Semiconductor has mainly researched four-layer diodes in technology and relied on military orders, while Fairchild Semiconductor has focused on the development of integrated circuits, relying on military orders in the early stage to accumulate original capital and technology, and later turned to the civilian market, and the two companies also launched long-term patent litigation because of the invention rights of integrated circuits, and it was not until 1966 that a cross-licensing agreement was reached.
In 1955, Jules Andrews and Walter Bond of Bell Labs applied the lithography technology originally used to make printed circuit boards to silicon wafers, realizing the method of processing electronic components by lithography on silicon wafers, and lithography technology and lithography machines began to be further developed.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit, which shocked the world, thus starting the space age and the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In 1958, 35-year-old Jack Kilby stayed in the laboratory in Texas all summer, and Jack Kilby, who was born in the military, was also a good friend of the Chinese, and during World War II, as one of the signal soldiers of the United States to aid China, he traveled all over the Midwest and made contributions to China's War of Resistance Against Japan.
At this time, most of the previous transistors were made of independent silicon or germanium, and he hoped that multiple semiconductors could be made on the same material, and there would be a simpler and more efficient wiring between them, and he succeeded, and in the year he led the invention of integrated circuits by TI Texas Instruments. This is a semiconductor device that integrates multiple transistors and other components on a single semiconductor chip, and the world's first integrated circuit was born, using the "countertop process". Since then, people have also used "chips" to refer to integrated circuits.
In 1958, Nikon of Japan cooperated with GCA of the United States and became its leading supplier, providing optical lenses required for projection lithography machines, and Canon immediately entered the first chain, and in the cooperation of GCA, Nikon and Canon gradually accumulated lithography machine production technology and technology.
In 1958, at the age of 27, Zhang Zhongmou jumped from Sylvania to TI Texas Instruments, becoming the first Chinese engineer of Texas Instruments, responsible for operating a transistor production line for IBM computers, and the yield rate of TI in this production line was almost 0. In 1949, at the age of 18, Zhang Zhongmou went from Hong Kong to the United States to study at Harvard University, at this time did not choose a major, but took some basic courses, based on the status and development of the Chinese in the United States at this time, he believed that "in the early 50s of the 20th century, the only really serious middle-class occupation that a Chinese-American could engage in was technical", and then transferred to MIT Xi mechanical engineering, and after graduation, he was responsible for improving the manufacturing yield of factories in Sylvania (a large electronics company). A few months after joining TI Texas Instruments, Zhang Zhongmou used his tough management style and super insight to make the yield rate of the production line he was responsible for jump to 25%, and he was soon appointed as the person in charge of the entire integrated circuit production at TI, and his management style has been used since then.
In the same year, Fairchild Semiconductor also made a breakthrough in the integrated circuit market, Robert. Neuss "conceived" the large-scale production of integrated circuits based on the planar processing process invented by Herni, and finally Rust turned it into reality, and the integrated circuit using the "planar process" was born.
In 1959, Fairchild Semiconductor and TI Texas Instruments began a 10-year patent lawsuit over the invention of integrated circuits, and finally the U.S. federal court ruled that integrated circuits were a common invention, co-owned by Jay Kkillby and Robert Noyce, the former being the first person to manufacture integrated circuits, and the latter being the first to propose the theory of integrated circuits applicable to industrial production.
The birth of integrated circuits made San Francisco's Silicon Valley take shape, and a large number of semiconductor talents gathered here from all over the world, and since then it has become the focus of the world, and of course, it has also attracted the attention of the Soviet Union. The birth of integrated circuits also had a great impact on the Soviet Union. Realizing that the birth of transistors and integrated circuits would be of great help to the military, computing power, and manufacturing industries, and that they wanted to set up their own "Silicon Valley", Alexander Shokin, then first deputy chairman of the USSR State Committee on Radio Electronics, told Khrushchev that "imagine a television set the size of a cigarette case."
The Soviet Union could overtake in a curve like a nuclear one, and the Soviet top level immediately agreed to increase efforts to support the development of the Soviet semiconductor industry. In Zelenograd, Moscow, a Soviet version of "Silicon Valley" was built. Zelenograd was originally to promote the development of the Soviet textile industry, after 1962, the Soviet Union wanted to make it a scientific paradise, covering research laboratories and production plants, according to the Soviet style at that time, supporting schools, cinemas, hospitals, libraries, etc., as if the existence of an independent society, this style also influenced China, during the construction of the third line, in many places, a factory is a small society.
Since the 50s, the overall strategy of the Soviet Union's research in the field of semiconductors has been to "copy" the United States. Through KGB spies, they entered the top universities, laboratories, and commercial markets in the United States in the name of exchange students, obtained transistor and chip technology and supporting equipment on the American market, and then brought them back to the Soviet Union, where the top leaders took the lead in copying and improving them. At this time, the gap between the United States and the Soviet Union is not large, and the United States will also purchase Soviet semiconductor devices through channels from time to time, according to a report by the CIA in 1959, the United States is only 2-4 years ahead of the Soviet Union in terms of the quality and quantity of transistors.
As for Japan, during the Korean War, it quickly became the "big rear" of the United States in the production of war materials, but at this time, the quality of the products produced in Japan was rough, and it was synonymous with poor products in the eyes of the United States. In July 1950, at the invitation of the Japan Federation of Scientists and Engineers, Dr. Deming, a management expert, went to Japan for 8 days to give a lecture, but Deming, who was not welcomed in the United States, was extremely sought after in Japan, and many entrepreneurs asked him for teaching and Xi, after which Deming helped Japan establish a proud product quality management system.
In 1952, Akio Morita, vice president of Tokyo Telecommunications Industry Co., Ltd. (later Sony), visited the United States, saw the huge market for semiconductors, and then applied for support to **, and then raised funds by himself, signed a temporary contract with the Western Electric Company to obtain a license for the use of transistors, began transistor research and development in August 1953, and successfully imitated the junction transistor in 1954, and Japan's semiconductor industry officially began.
In 1955, Sony launched the world's first Xiuzhen transistor radio, the TR-55, marking that Japan was already at the leading level in transistor applications. In 1956, Japan woke up and began to support semiconductors on a large scale, and in 1957 promulgated the "Temporary Measures for the Revitalization of the Electronics Industry Act" to reduce taxes and provide subsidies for the semiconductor industry, and encourage everyone to vigorously introduce advanced technology from the United States and develop the semiconductor industry in its own country. In 1959, Japan's transistor production surpassed that of the United States and ranked first in the world, and a new challenger was coming.
As a leader in semiconductor research during World War II, Germany was strictly controlled in the early post-war period and could not develop in aerospace, computers, and defense-related industries. Germany's research in the semiconductor industry immediately turned to industrial, medical and other scenarios, which also made Germany's semiconductor industry form its own unique industrial characteristics and advantages in the following decades. In 1953, Siemens obtained a license for the ultra-purity silicon process, realized the transition from germanium to silicon, laid the foundation for the development of semiconductor technology in Germany after the war, and began to develop the first generation of junction transistors for televisions and radios in 1954.
In the 50s, Germany's overall semiconductor technology lagged behind the United States and Japan, and later benefited from the easing of relations with European countries, Germany began to cooperate with other European countries, participated in the establishment of the European Semiconductor Consortium (ESCA), established a joint venture with the French Thomson company, etc., and in 1958, Siemens established the first integrated circuit factory in Europe for the production of logic circuits for electronic computers.
In the 50s of the 20th century, led by a group of enthusiastic young people who had returned from studying in Europe and the United States, China was gradually exploring the semiconductor industry with Chinese characteristics based on the semiconductor facilities built with the help of the Soviet Union. In 1953, semiconductors were included in the first and second five-year plans of key scientific and technological research projects, in the same year Beijing Electron Tube Factory (774 factory, the predecessor of BOE) inspection, began to produce germanium crystals and diodes, in 1957 the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Physics Lin Lanying successfully developed China's first silicon single crystal, laid the foundation for the development of microelectronics and optoelectronics, after which the country referred to the situation of the Soviet Union and the United States, in order to avoid misjudging the direction, decided to develop in parallel in the direction of "southern silicon and northern germanium".
South Korea in the 50s of the 20th century, the first stage was fighting the "Korean War", and the latter stage was reconstruction, and at this time Samsung was still a ** company in the early days, engaged in food processing and textile production, exporting seafood to Hong Kong, Macao and Singapore and other places, and began to enter the sugar field in the mid-50s, and expanded through large-scale mergers and acquisitions in the late 50s to become a chaebol in the fields of steel, fertilizer, and tires. In 1959, South Korea's Golden Star Society (the predecessor of LG) introduced Fairchild technology to produce Korea's first vacuum tube radio, which is considered to be the origin of Korea's semiconductor industry.
Three months after the Soviet Union successfully launched the first artificial satellite of the earth, the United States also issued its first satellite explorer 1, at the same time the United States established the National Space Administration (NASA), and invested a lot of money and talents to develop rockets, satellites and spacecraft to start a space race with the Soviet Union. It supports basic and applied research in semiconductor technology, and is then introduced in the war.
In 1960, the Soviet Union succeeded in excimer laser for the first time, and this technology became the basis for step-by-step lithography machines. In 1961, the USSR began production of the first generation of integrated circuits for use in the military and aerospace sectors. In the same year, Soviet cosmonaut Gagarin became the first person to fly into space aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft, which stimulated the United States and the military, and then the United States began to accelerate the use of semiconductors in the above-mentioned areas.
In 1961, East Germany began to build the Berlin Wall, cutting off East and West Berlin, which became one of the symbols of the Cold War. The bipolar confrontation between the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact and the US-led NATO has further escalated, and the two sides have begun a new round of arms race in the fields of missiles, aircraft, and tanks.
In 1962, TI Texas Instruments provided 22 sets of chips for the "Minuteman" missile guidance system, which was the first time that integrated circuits were used in missile guidance systems. By the mid-60s, the United States began to use chips in all kinds of aircraft, from satellites to sonar, from torpedoes to telemetry systems, from the Apollo spacecraft to various advanced aircraft. The military once became the largest customer of Fairchild Semiconductor and TI Texas Instruments, taking Fairchild Semiconductor as an example, in 1965, 95% of its semiconductor products would be purchased by the ** and military for military and aerospace.
In October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out, and the United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war in the Caribbean. As a result, the United States further strengthened sanctions against the Soviet bloc and increased its support for its allies to further counter the impact of the Soviet Union.
In 1962, Japan's NEC introduced planar lithography technology from Fairchild Semiconductor of the United States and began to produce integrated circuits, and Hitachi and Toshiba also reached technology transfer agreements with RCA and General Electric of the United States.
In 1960, the German company Siemens began to produce silicon transistors and used them to replace germanium transistors, which improved the performance and reliability of electronic devices. In 1963, Siemens AG signed a technical cooperation agreement with TI Texas Instruments to introduce microprocessor technology and start producing computer chips, followed by cooperation with IBM in 1965 to introduce integrated circuit technology to produce memory chips.
In 1963, the KGB of the Soviet Union established the T Bureau, which means technology, and its mission is to steal the latest science and technology from abroad. At the same time, Boris Marin, a spy sent to the United States to study, brought back the chip SN-51 sold by TI Texas Instruments in the United States, which was also used by NASA's Explorer 18. Shokin asked Soviet engineers to "copy" it within 3 months, and the Soviet engineers succeeded, and the Soviet Union thought that it could maintain a gap of only 3-4 years with the United States for a period of time through this efficient way, and then wait for its own industry to take off and overtake in the corner, which firmly established the Soviet Union's "copying" line, and it was also the beginning of the cliff-like backwardness of the Soviet semiconductors in the later period.
In 1963, Japan** asked NEC to open up the technology imported from the United States to other Japanese companies to share, and Mitsubishi and other companies also benefited from this and entered the semiconductor market.
Fairchild Semiconductor, which got orders from the United States and reached the original accumulation, did not stop there, they found a larger market: the civilian market.
In 1965, Moore of Fairchild Semiconductor was invited by the journal "Electronics" to write an article in which he made a ** trend in integrated circuits based on data from the past few years, and he believed that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every once in a while without a significant increase in cost. This is the famous "Moore's Law", and the impact of Moore's Law is huge, stimulating semiconductor innovation and competition, so that computer technology and electronic products have developed rapidly.
Noyce and Moore began to look ahead to the advent of personal computers and mobile phones. In the early 60s, Fairchild became the first company to provide civilian customers with a complete product line of ready-made integrated circuits, and also began to reduce prices on a large scale, from $20 to $2 to stimulate more civilian customers to try, and the civilian market began to usher in spring, and the annual sales of computers in the United States increased from 1,000 units in 1957 to 187,000 units in 1967. In 1968, the number of chips purchased by the computer industry was the same as that of the United States, and Fairchild chips accounted for 80% of the industry.
By the time the United States successfully landed on the moon for the first time, Silicon Valley companies had become much less dependent on defense and space contracts, and the civilian market, especially the computer market, had become the core focus of attention. Silicon Valley ushered in an era in which business led the development and application of science and technology, rather than being dominated by the military and the military.
In 1965, South Korea led by Park Chung-hee promulgated the "Foreign Capital Introduction Act", using the strategy of cheap labor to provide a number of preferential policies for foreign investment in South Korea, and adopting the mode of processing with supplied materials for production.
Beginning in 1966, the situation in China changed, and in the following 10 years, the semiconductor industry was severely impacted.
Beginning in the 60s of the 20th century, the capital market for the semiconductor industry continued to rise, and the employees' requirements for salary incentives were also increasing day by day, and serious differences broke out between the core employees of Fairchild Semiconductor led by Noyce and the parent company Fairchild Company in the fight for options, and finally Noyce and others chose to leave and set up another portal, on July 18, 1968, Noyce established Intel, and this year, Fairchild Semiconductor began to decline, and Silicon Valley ushered in a spring.
In 1968, the Soviet Union began to produce the second generation of integrated circuits, using "silicon-germanium alloy" as a semiconductor material, but it was unstable at high temperature performance and consumed large power.
In 1969, American astronaut Armstrong successfully landed on the moon aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft, during which he used the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), and Ti Texas Instruments provided 2,800 silicon crystal logic chips with the model SN-2472, which was the first computer made of silicon chips to guide astronauts to and from the moon. This marked a major victory for the United States in the space race and a complete victory for the United States over the Soviet Union in the field of semiconductors.
The introduction of Moore's Law and the vigorous development of the American civilian market quickly made the Soviet "copying" strategy quickly ineffective, and by the end of the 60s, the Soviet Union and the United States were already in a clear backward position in the semiconductor competition, and have since collapsed.
For Japan, in 1968, Sony and Ti Texas Instruments formed a joint venture to introduce microprocessor technology. After 15 years of development and the support of the United States, Japan in the semiconductor industry at this time from imitation to gradual innovation, in 1969 Ezaki Rei Yuna discovered the quantum tunneling effect of electrons in semiconductors, which laid the foundation for later flash memory technology. Japan's semiconductor industry is in full swing.
In Germany, in 1969, Siemens also began to cooperate with Intel to introduce bipolar random access memory (DRAM) technology and begin to produce dynamic memory chips. Germany's semiconductor industry system is well formed, but there is still a gap between Germany and Japan and the United States.
By 1970, the chip war between the United States and the Soviet Union was no longer in suspense, and the United States was far ahead in this field.
The biggest insight of the chip war between the United States and the Soviet Union: the hard-core technology represented by the chip industry cannot be successful by relying on the accumulation of ** command + technology.
We often hear the idea that we can make atomic bombs, but we can't do chips
These two are really different, which represents two kinds of thinking and ending.
In essence, the "atomic bomb" is an absolute war product, and chips are an industry with commercial properties. The former does not need to be considered too much in terms of cost, scale, timeliness, user experience, etc., and the core is to "build it", which is a technical problem, and the thousands of atomic bombs produced by the Soviet Union on a large scale in the sixties and seventies are still "competitive". The latter as a commercial industry, technology iteration is fast, market requirements change rapidly, the industrial chain is extremely complex, every link has to consider the cost and user experience in the process from "product" to "commodity", a lot of technology 5 years ago has lost its competitiveness now.
Before Moore's Law and mass civilianism, the USSR, by its "copy strategy", could maintain a gap of only 3-5 years in the field of chips. After that, the acceleration of technological iteration and the rapid decline of costs, when the Soviet Union obtained the finished product, it was already one generation behind, and by the time of production, it had already fallen to 2-3 generations, so the Soviet Union also fell into the death spiral of "introduction, replication, trial production, mass production, backwardness, and re-introduction". In the 80s of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century, we also made many similar mistakes, introduced a large number of semiconductor wafer production lines, and when the technology was digested and ready for mass production, the technology and cost were far behind the requirements of the market.
* Be a promoter of hardcore technology, but should not be the dominant one. In the field of chips, the Soviet Union and the United States both began with military needs, and provided huge subsidies and support in the early days, and most of the company's revenue came from procurement, but after the technology was relatively formed, the United States began to turn to the market to dominate the technical direction and products.
The Soviet Union belongs to the first strong control from beginning to end, to be precise, the Soviet Union has no market thinking at all, no cost thinking, and has made a lot of failed decisions, such as when the United States replaced germanium with silicon, the Soviet Union chose to try to replace silicon with germanium, and the Soviet Union chose to take the electron tube line first when the United States took the transistor line (which can withstand the radiation of a nuclear war) ......
On the other hand, hard-core technology needs innovation, requires a lot of whimsical experts and allows for trial and error, but it is not an innovation department by nature, stability is always the first factor, too much management will make the market lose vitality and confidence, which also leads to the doomed failure of this model. In the field of hardcore technology, how long is the hand of the **?How much force?How long does it take?This is worthy of serious reflection in the semiconductor competition between the USSR and the United States.
After 1970, Japan began to rise in the semiconductor industry, and 10 years later became the biggest challenger to the United States in this field.