USA is a cauldron where ideas are set into gizmos. It has maintained the leading position in frontier technologies over the years and there is a readiness to explore newer dimensions in business
Asignificant contribution to elec- tronics by USA is Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent lamp, whose byproducts are electronic devices. Lee De Forest of Federal Telegraph Company, Palo Alto, in 1912 introduced the third electrode in the two-element Fleming valve. The great expansion of the solidstate electronics based on the transistor diode dates back to the period 1945-48.
The microelectronics revolution really began at about the same time as ENIAC was unveiled although nobody realised it at that time. It was made possible by three key inventions, namely, the transistor, the planar process, and IC.
With ENIAC the process of computer manufacturing really picked up. Two years after ENIAC, computer UNIVAC stole the show when it was introduced on US TV during a presidential election and correctly forecast a landslide victory for Eisenhower only after five per cent votes had been counted.
A peep into the history
While in search of switches for amplifiers to replace mechanical relays and the valves that troubled ENIAC much, J. Bardeen, W.H. Brattain, and Willian Shockley came up with the point-contact transistor, a small piece of germanium. This was however later changed to pure silicon, the main ingredient of beach sand.
By mid-1950 there were a number of firms producing different types of transistors, most of which were spin-offs of Bell and other large companies. A new breed of people had emerged as the scientific entrepreneurs.
It was Fairchild Semiconductor, a company started only in 1957, that produced the first transistor using the planar technique of 1959.
When transistors produced by planar process hit the market, there were 84 firms operating in what had been known as the semiconductor industry that then concentrated around Route 128 near Boston, Massachussets, and Stanford Universities in California. These institutions provided for academia, industry, and R&D to melt into each other. In fact, it was this phenomenon that helped USA to speed up technology development. Route 128 and Silicon Valley developed into IT centres with the presence of MIT, Harvard, and Stanford University in the immediate vicinity.
Large purchases of transistors by military for communication equipment boosted the business to such an extent that by 1963 nearly half of all transistor sales were to the US government. Semiconductor devices were also finding their way to radios, hearing aids, TV, cameras, and, of course, computers.
The next big step came with the invention of ICs, generally credited to Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert N. Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor.
In 1969, a young engineer named Marcian Ted Hoff at the small firm Intel devised a way of improving the design of chips for an electronic calculator made by the Japanese firm Busicom. In 1971, he succeeded in putting the entire central processing unit of a computer on a single chip. This device was called microprocessor.
Consequently, computers were brought into business market by a handful of companies on both sides of Atlantic. IBM quickly carved out a dominant role bringing out successively more powerful and smaller computers and eventually entered the PC market, in which it created a de facto standard.
The US electronics biggies in 1950—GE, Westinghouse, and RCA—missed the microelectronics movement. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were the ones who in 1975 gave the idea of a PC to their bosses in Hewlett-Packard, the company renowned for its R&D. They borrowed ideas from Xerox’s R&D facility, Palo Alto Research Centre, which had flaunted a PC called Alto in 1973 but noticed its commercial use only in 1979. The two started Apple Computer in a rented garage, which entered the Fortune 500 list within six years.
In USA, the most organised efforts to boost high technology emanated from the private sector, especially in the form of joint research ventures. These efforts were depicted by institutions like Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) founded by twelve major companies including Control Data, Motorola, and Sperry in 1982 under the leadership of Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former director of CIA. MCC was later joined by other companies and established a base in Austin, Texas. It began work in 1984.
The Semiconductor Research Corporation backed by about 35 companies including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, RCA and some of the MCC sponsors was also founded in 1982 and it chose Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, as its base. The SRC’s main role has been to commission basic research on microelectronics from key universities and to build collaborative work between academies and the industry.
Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Strategic Computing Plan, and Strategic Defence Initiative are also pouring millions of dollars into microchip, supercomputer, and artificial intellegence. A further $1.6-billion funding for the US semiconductor industry was proposed by Defence Science Board task force in December 1986.
The Small Business Innovation Research programme that started in 1982 required federal agencies to earmark a large proportion of their R&D funds for small high-technology companies. Small firms employ 60 per cent of the US workforce. They have received more than 60 per cent of patents issued and produce on an average 2.5 times more innovations per employee than larger firms. Despite the fact, in recent years they received less than 6 per cent of federal R&D contracts and large firms were 2.8 times as likely to receive an award as a small firm.
High-technology fever hit Capitol Hill in response to Japanese challenge in the late eighties in the form of Sematech consortium.
High-technology states
Prior to the eighties, only four states, namely, Massachussets, North Carolina, Connecticut, and Florida, had programmes to promote and attract high-technology industries. Even California, Texas, and New York relied entirely on private universities and private venture capitalists to develop high-technology ideas. Today, no less than 38 states boast of comprehensive, high-technology development programmes.
When MCC was looking for a site for its headquarters, 57 communities from 22 states made approaches deluging the consortium with package deals and ever-increasing financial coffers.
States introduced tax incentives and put up cash in the form of venture capital, sometimes taken from the pension funds of state employees. Several built stylish, low-rent incubator facilities for high-technology start-ups, while many developed technology centres or science parks in connection with nearby universities and colleges. Other states established networks in order to bring together local investors and entrepreneurs while virtually every state claimed to be pouring resources into education and training, particularly the technical departments of colleges and universities.
Most states indulged in the traditional arts of self-promotion and hustling. Following the success of Silicon Valley, civic boosters gave the US Silicon Prairie (Texas), Silicon Mountain (Colorado), Silicon Desert (Arizonia), Silicon Bayou (Louisiana), Silicon Tundra (Minnesota), Silicon Forest (Oregon), and Silicon Valley East (Troy-Albany-Schenectady, New York). In pursuit of high-technology urban planners from Atlanta and North Carolina to Pittsburg and New Hampshire and Salt Lake City and Seattle extolled the merits of their areas, each claiming superior educational and research facilities, a better business climate, and higher quality of life.
Silicon Valley, the leader in IT, continued to attract young well-educated Americans. It created a pool of highly skilled scientific and technical personnel—a vital requirement for a new expanding industry like microelectronics. Without this skilled workforce Silicon Valley would never have originated. Likewise, military funding played an important role in the development of Silicon Valley.
With emphasis on individuals rather than companies, most electronics engineers have had no qualms about job-hopping from firm to firm, taking with them their turnkey knowledge. Job change provided super starts to advance their careers to gain further knowledge and to partner a winning team. Many entrepreneurs failed and started successfully again after taking a beating.
There are provisions of laws, regulations, and conventions for security, taxing, accounting, corporate governance, bankruptcy, immigration, R&D, and more. The government is a part of the solution and not the problem.
Major inventions and inventors
The charge-coupled device that can see 80 times more effectively than photographic film was invented in 1969 at Bell Labs by George Smith and Willard Boyce. It replaced bulky vacuum tubes known as ‘vidicons’ and made possible a new generation of artificial intelligence.
USA is a cauldron where ideas are set into gizmos. It has maintained the leading position in frontier technologies over the years and there is a readiness to explore newer dimensions in business.
In 1996, Intel’s research division designed the world’s fastest super computer that could perform one billion mathematical operations per second. The US intends to build a super computer that packs the power of a man’s 57,000 years of round-the-clock work to maintain the lead safety of Nukes without underground testing. The super computer would be able to carry out 1.8 trillion calculations in a second to ensure that it never needs to carry out Nuke testing. It would be as powerful as 50,000 mainframe computers in the world put together. DARPA is pouring millions of dollars on research on super computers and artificial intelligence.
USA leads in space and defence robotics. Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotic Institute is the world’s largest industry centre for robotics and manufacturing technologies. Robots are widely employed in the manufacturing of drugs and automobiles. ATM is the most popular version of robotics. Global Hawk is a robotic plane jet powered with a wing span equivalent to a Boeing 737 that flew from Edwards Air Force Base in California and landed in Edinburg, Australia.
USA is home to the three microprocessor designers of repute, namely, Intel, AMD, and Cryrix. Intel has recently unveiled the world’s first single-chip gigabit Ethernet controller that will help accelerate the deployment of gigabit Ethernet networks by greatly simplifying design for system engineers. It is also producing some of the peripheral products that surround the computer: MP3 players, remote surfing devices, and PC cameras to name a few. While Intel does not aim to be a dominant player in any of these categories, it intends helping them get off the ground, with Pentium IV expected to break the 2.5GHz barrier by the fourth quarter of this year.
Japanese and Americans differ in many ways. Unlike Japan where the whole country mobilises behind a certain idea or concept, Americans don’t. They are proud of individuality. US companies don’t keep open channels of communication in between them, writes Pamela Mc Corduck in the Fifth Generation. Most US companies meet with each other in a court of law. Sharing research is taboo, sharing market information is worse, and cracking markets together is satanic. The anti-trust legislation is very strong and hangs like a Democles sword. Don’t we know about the break-up of AT&T?
Yet networking companies like Cisco, 3Com, and IBM have forged links with big telecommunication network operators as they struggle to come to grips with new telephony epitomised by the likes of World Communication that combines traditional voice telephony and Internet Protocol (IP) expertise.
Within the IT sector itself Microsoft has moved aggressively into the content business with substantial investment in MSN, MSNBC, and Web TV. Sun Microsystems, best known for its powerful workstations, RISC, microprocessors and Web servers, has become a name to reckon with in the software industry with its pioneering development of Java. The AOL-Time Warner merger in January 2000 with a market capitalisation of about $350 billion epitomises the future look of the media—the Internet, cable TV, and print all provided by a single conglomerate.
Aimster is a US invention that does something more than Napster, the music swapping programme. It swaps any kind of digital file, including video, text, and photographs. It also piggybacks on instant message system that counts millions of users including AOL-Time Warners giant AIM services. Cadence Design System Inc., based in San Jose, is the leader in electronic design automation and among the top-seven software companies in the world. Cadence India in 1987 produced Check Plus test, designed by Indian researchers, which was acclaimed world over. IBM has come out with system-on-a-chip. Its new processor for the Internet-age system-on-a-chip combines the conventional microprocessor with handheld Internet-ready device features. Known as power PC-I AP, the chip draws on the strength of IBM’s own PowerPC chip series that powers Apple computers, and includes both ready-to-use and programmable elements. In 1994, Qualcomm patented a phone system called CDMA. Soon a plethora of small- and medium-scale cellular companies deployed CDMA using 800MHz and 1900MHz bands. Sprint took CDMA nation-wide in the US around 1996. CDMA proved to be a success story. This technology uses the entire band for all telephones, allowing users to talk simultaneously on the same channel. How each conversation is plucked out of this electronic cacaphony is the magic of CDMA.
US companies have struck hard in handheld computers. Names like Palm V and Handspring Visor PDAs are quite popular. Motorola, the communication giant, has come out with a phone, V1000, specially designed for youths that can send short-text messages.
A large number of US companies like Hewlett-Packard, Autodesk, and Intel have now taken to venture capital. Intel’s business development programme has become one of the largest corporate venture investment programmes in the technology sector. Today, Intel’s portfolio includes more than 300 technology-related companies valued at $5.8 billion.
Sony, IBM, and Toshiba have joined hands to develop a teraflop-class microprocessor that, the companies hope, will make possible within the next five years consumer electronics devices more powerful than IBM’s Deep Blue super computer.
The US industry is home to a number of inventions. Web browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator) and search machines (Yahoo, AltaVista, AOL, and Google) are all American.
Nortel Networks is the leader in optical networks. IBM and Dell are the world’s biggest computer corporations. Motorola is the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer after Nokia. Even the world’s largest software company Microsoft is American. AOL is the largest Internet service provider. Seagate is the world’s largest storage technology provider.
The first e-mail managing programme to list selectively, read file forward, and respond to message was written by Dr Laurence G. Roberts. The mouse was invented by D.C. Enghard in 1968, the ethernet by Dr Robert M. Bob Metcalf, founder of 3Com Corp., and the graphical Web browser mosaic by Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape Communication. Public key infrastructure (PKI), a technology that ensures protection to communication of information, was designed by Martin Hellman, a computer science professor at Stanford University.
The future vision
Even the future belongs to the US. John C. Carson, chief technology officer at Invine Sensors Corp. in Silicon Valley, says that “beyond 2012 chips that exploit the quirky world of quantum mechanics promise far bigger leaps because chips won’t use wires duplicating the human brain.” Indians like Sabeer Bhatia, Vinod Khosla, Vinod Dham, and scores of others have helped Silicon Valley blossom with new technologies and entrepreneurship.
DARPA has awarded Personick, director of the Centre for Telecommunications and Information Networking at Philadelphia’s Drexel University, the task of making the Pegasus router that will employ photonic devices to manipulate the beams of light sent down optical cables.
IBM’s project Eliza seeks to create computers that act much like biological entities. These computers will maintain and update themselves, and handle maintenance schedules, fight hackers, and correct input errors.
Efforts are on at the US Jet Propulsion Lab at Pasadena, California, to develop the design for interplanetary Internet. This design effort is underway with support from DARPA, the same agency that sponsored the original Internet design around 25 years ago.This entire orchestra of technology is part of the new economy. Heavy investments to computers and associated business changes have been possible mainly because of the ease of financing. Venture capital firms have helped the growth of the new technology and innovations in enterprises.
If technology is the engine of the new US economy, finance is the fuel. Venture capital funding is today running annually at a rate of $100 billion. This is what has enabled new economy powerhouses such as Cisco, Netscape, and Amazon.com to grow explosively.
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