(Inside Technology) by Cyrus C. M. Mody (Author)
How, beginning in the mid 1960s, the US semiconductor industry helped shape changes in American science, including a new orientation to the short-term and the commercial.
Since
the mid 1960s, American science has undergone significant changes in
the way it is organized, funded, and practiced. These changes include
the decline of basic research by corporations; a new orientation toward
the short-term and the commercial, with pressure on universities and
government labs to participate in the market; and the promotion of
interdisciplinarity. In this book, Cyrus Mody argues that the changes in
American science that began in the 1960s co-evolved with and were
shaped by the needs of the “civilianized” US semiconductor industry.
In
1965, Gordon Moore declared that the most profitable number of circuit
components that can be crammed on a single silicon chip doubles every
year. Mody views “Moore's Law” less as prediction than as
self-fulfilling prophecy, pointing to the enormous investments of
capital, people, and institutions the semiconductor industry
required—the “long arm” of Moore's Law that helped shape all of science.
Mody offers a series of case studies in microelectronics that
illustrate the reach of Moore's Law. He describes the pressures on
Stanford University's electrical engineers during the Vietnam era, IBM's
exploration of alternatives to semiconductor technology, the emergence
of consortia to integrate research across disciplines and universities,
and the interwoven development of the the molecular electronics
community and associated academic institutions as the vision of a
molecular computer informed the restructuring of research programs.
