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What comes to mind when you think of semiconductors? In 2021, probably words like “shortage,” “supply chain,” and “Taiwan.”
But if you had been thinking about semiconductors a decade ago, it might have been “smartphone.” And way back in the 1950s, it may have been “Texas Instruments,” or even “germanium” (silicon wasn’t viable for semiconductors until 1954). In the 1800s, you’d probably just say “semi-what?”
Since 1965, semiconductors have followed an exponential trend called Moore’s Law, roughly doubling the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit every two years. That has enabled the creation of smaller devices, like smartphones, capable of computational power far greater than the massive, room-sized mainframe computers of yesteryear, and paved the way for machine learning, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles, and other computationally intensive technologies.
“What happened with semiconductors is, while becoming more complex and capable, they vastly simplified them,” Shahin Farshchi, a partner at Lux Capital and a former electrical engineer, told Emerging Tech Brew. “That’s the magic that semiconductors brought. By collapsing many billions of components into effectively a single piece of glass, they were able to make these machines many orders of magnitude millions, if not billions, of times more complex while making them millions and billions of times more simple at the same time.”
Now, the semiconductor industry is worth an estimated $527 billion dollars, and billions of dollars in private and public investment is flowing into the sector as the ongoing shortage proves just how critical this little device is.
To get to this point required at least 200 years of science, engineering, business, and policy advances—and below is a timeline we put together of some key moments in semiconductor history. This isn’t a comprehensive timeline, but rather an illustrative one, meant to give a sense of the many, many contributions it took to get here.
Looking ahead...
Farshchi sees a world of ever-greater specialization for semiconductors. There's already been some movement away from general-purpose chips, and toward semiconductors ready-made for specific applications like cloud computing, machine learning, and smartphones, but Farshchi expects this to intensify further.
“I do see a future where the general-purpose processor does less work,” Farshchi said. “I do expect there to be more and more specialized tasks that are being done by specialized computers, and I expect those specialized chips to be far more efficient, far cheaper, and far more performing than they otherwise would be if they were general platforms.”