California’s Silicon Valley — the home of electronics

Press, 26 December 1979, Page 7

California’s Silicon Valley — the home of electronics

Silicon Vauey, Cacfornia, a stretch of one-time rural landscape and quiet farm towns >outh of San Franc >c<-. gets i< nickname from the tmy ch ps producing what is being called the most profound industrial revolution since the world adopted the steam engine. Silicon Valley does n t appear on conventional maps, it is the imaginative term for a 40-mile strip containing the greatest concentration of electronics firms in the world There are more than 600 and they employ 300,000 people. Their tola, annual product is variously estimated some observers say it is $5OOO million, others guess it at $BOOO million, it is still in a state of phenomenal expansion, expected to continue to proliferate well into the decade of the 80s — if it can recruit enough people, find housing for them, and withstand the pressures of foreign competition. The layman is bewildered by the electronic mysteries of Silicon Valley, with its great barbed parks enclosing campus-iike complexes of modern buildings. He is baffled by the crypticlanguage spoken so fluently by the people who work in these colleges of industry. This tongue, which the. writer has come to think of as “Electrish.” is studded with coined words (micro-processor. semiconductor, mini-comput-er) and acronyms (R.A.M., M. 0.5., L.5.1.C.). A layman interviewer has frequently to interrupt someone speaking Electrish, so that terms such as flopping disc, integral energy storage or megabit can be translated. However, there are. plenty of readily understandable facts which illustrate the fantastic growth, the mind-boggling potential and the troubling problems of this industry. Its birth is often credited to a scientific Merlin who has spent most of his long life at Stanford University and made it the seminal and sustaining institution from which much of modern electronics has evolved. “If you want to develop a world centre of innovative technology, it’s simple,” said a Stanford colleague. “Get yourself a Fred Terman,” he said. Dr Terman, whose first

degrees in engineering were from Stanford where his father was a professor, was a brilliant student and teacher, engrossed in the early applications of electrical circuitry to radio. Palo Alto, then a country town bordering the great landholdings that contained the university, in 1908 became the birthplace of the exciting industry which dominates it today. That was the year in which a company was formed which developed, under DeForest, the triode valve making possible the amplification of radio signals. Dr Terman encouraged his best students to go into business in the Palo Alto area and got Stanford to lease them the land on which to build. By the 19305, the Varian Company produced the klystron valve which made war-time radar possible. It was Dr Terman who invented “chaff,” the ribbons of metal foil which were dropped from Allied planes to thwart German detection .of attacking aircraft. After World War 11. Stanford established on its own large tracts of emptyland the industrial park for private companies and the boom was on. Among the first Terman former students to set up there were William Hew-

lett and David Packard, who had invented and -old the first audio oscillator in a one-car garage behind a private home at the end of World War 11. William Shockley. Stanford alumnus and inventor of the transistor, established a Palo Alto company in 1955. and from it eight of his young recruits defected to organise Fairchild. the firm which pat ented the manufacture of the semi-conductor. That nucleus in turn spawned Intel, the company which first produced the integrated circuit. Thus it was that Professor Terman saw Silicon Valley grow from backyard workshops to the multi-million dollar factories which mark it now. He has seen the digital computer shrink in size while increasing in capacity until the functions once performed by a machine bigger than a locomotive and costing a million dollars can he done faster now by a device held in the hand and retailing for $2O. And Silicon Valley, once famous for its production of prunes, is more heavily populated than San Francisco. The expotential growth of semi-conductor performance and the equally spectacular slide in semiconductor cost manifest what Mr Benjamin Rosen calls the golden age of electronics. Mr Rosen, a financial analyst specialising in electronics companies, recently illustrated the phenomena of the industry with some graphic comparisons. In 1960. a silicon chip could memorise one piece of information; now it can retain 65,000 pieces and

by 1990 there will be chips with the capacity of more than a million In 1946 a digital computer used 140,000 watts of electricity. weighed 16.000 kilograms and cost $480,04X1. Today a minicomputer which can outperform that old one uses two watts weighs half a kilogram and costs $lO. Professor Terman, the academic seer who envisaged much of this EXYEj ago and who created what be called a community of technical scholars to bring it into being, is still working his scientific magic. His papers, the met iculous record Of a half century of scholarship, are being processed and indexed at the university’ library as a major resource for new academic, generations. I'hey total 180,000 items. The professor. now provost emeritbs of the university and approaching 80. lives at Stanford and is still an active consultant there. Is the electronics in« dustry, with all its astonishing contributions to today's push-button, in-stant-computing. robotcontrolled. infinitely precise instruments, reaching its peak? Is its intricacy and esoterica so far beyond the mental grasp of all but its own scientists that it has outstripped man’s needs? In Silicon Valley they sav "No. "The world is on the brink of a new explosion in electronics technology," they say. “The golden age of electronics is ahead Of us, not behind us,” says the president of one of the largest firms in the industry. A second article will examine the dazzling predictions of the world of "computational plenty," in which it is predicted that the magic chip will be the technological crude oil of tomorrow.

1 his is the first of three articles in which John Hutchison, our San Francisco correspondent, explores the spectacular performance and exciting future of the world of electronics .nd examines New Zealand’s potential role in the merging silicon revolution.