TY - JOUR AU - Doom, Travis AB - ‘In 1947 there was one transistor in the world; twenty years later, several billion transistors were sold per year for about a dollar each. Today, a single chip containing more than a billion transistors costs a few hundred dollars. Even before the fortieth anniversary of Moore’s Law (2005), the semiconductor industry was making more transistors per year than the world’s farmers were growing grains of rice—and at lower unit cost by two orders of magnitude!’ The quote above taken from Cyrus Mody’s new book captures why scholars continue to study the history of microelectronics: it remains one of the most transformative technological developments emerging from the twentieth century. As Mody points out in the introduction, ‘the computer and electronics industry contributes more to the United States’ gross domestic product than any other manufacturing industry’. And yet Moore’s Law, not unlike the linear model, can be a frustrating thing to those engaged with the history of technology or science policy. The strange thing about Moore’s Law is how its common usage has become divorced from the physical thing it represents. It seems increasingly rare that the words integrated circuit appear in the same sentence as Moore’s Law. I bet more people could describe (incorrectly) Moore’s Law than could describe the basic function of a transistor. That’s because Moore’s Law has morphed into some false indicator of a general, exponential upward trajectory of technological advancement like the world has never experienced before. Never mind changes wrought by railroad, sanitation, electricity, antibiotics, or any number of innovations more than a few decades old. Moore’s Law is proof that the world is changing faster than ever. Except that’s not really Moore’s Law. Cyrus Mody gets it right, I think, from the very beginning. He provides a clear definition of Moore’s Law, but contextualizes it as a ‘social fact’, something that has proven ‘both malleable and durable’. Mody describes money and marriage as familiar examples of ‘social facts’. Of course there are also examples from other areas of science and technology. The appraisal of oil and gas resources is a case analogous to microelectronics (Donald 2000). The predicted quantity of oil and gas we can profitably extract from the Earth—like the predicted quantity of components we can profitably cram on a silicon wafer—is shaped not just by existing technical capabilities, but also the interpretation of how those capabilities could evolve in the future and how markets, politics, and other factors alter those interpretations which ultimately drive development. Interestingly, the approach taken by the author does not focus on what might be considered the source of Moore’s Law: the leading efforts of companies like Intel and their competitors who design and manufacture silicon semiconductor devices. Mody acknowledges that this is an area already carefully studied. Indeed, I found the introduction in Mody’s book especially valuable because it provides a good synthesis across much of this prior work. Mody focuses instead on the organizations evolving in parallel with Moore’s Law: the academic research centers; the government funding agencies; and the exploratory research ongoing at places like IBM. In my view, the greatest strength of Mody’s approach is that readers learn about the failed attempts to find alternatives to silicon semiconductors in response to concerns that the demise of Moore’s Law was always just over the horizon. The history of failed technology development efforts can be very informative. Mody walks through the decisions managers faced and the divisions between manufacturing teams and research teams. Mody points out that while ‘Silicon Valley firms stuck to a conservative, incremental engineering philosophy … large, established firms such as IBM and AT&T repeatedly explored more daring and disruptive engineering solutions ….’ The author also shows the longevity of ideas like molecular electronics, which emerged and reemerged in academic research settings. He provides a detailed account of how key, military-funded academic research centers positioned themselves amid the Vietnam era, and how new institutions like the NSF Engineering Research Centers came to fruition. The only weakness in the author’s approach is that Moore’s Law is marching along in the background. Mody acknowledges that the advantage of silicon semiconductors has to do with the physical nature of the material, not just its head start in commercial development. But the phrase ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ appears more than once and in those few instances it seems to me like a weak argument of technological lock-in. I think a few more pages detailing the stuff that goes into manufacturing silicon semiconductors would have been interesting and helpful, especially to further understand why it always outpaced the alternatives. I will add that a short, excellent article appeared last year in Bloomberg Businessweek, providing the most vivid story I have read on what actually goes into creating state-of-the art silicon chips (Chafkin and King 2016). Overall, the author makes a convincing case that the development of microelectronics helped give initial shape to the consortiums and academic centers that now characterize so much of our modern R&D enterprise. Mody also mentions that the energy industry and the aerospace industry could be comparable cases. I agree. If I have just one overall criticism, it is that the book lacks this comparative context. While it rings true to me that the microelectronics industry had a leading role in shaping American science, the timing and scale of other areas which emerged in similar form—like energy, aerospace, and biotechnology—is not discussed. The upside is that instead Mody’s chapters go into great depth, and I think many readers of this Journal will value his approach and enjoy reading this carefully researched book. References Donald L. G. ( 2000) ‘Oil and Gas Resource Appraisal: Diminishing Reserves, Increasing Supplies’, in Sarewitz D., Roger P.Jr., Radford B. Jr. (eds) Prediction: Science, Decision Making, and the Future of Nature , pp. 231– 49. Washington, DC: Island Press. Chafkin M., King I. ( 2016) ‘How Intel Makes a Chip’. Bloomberg Businessweek , 9 Jun. 2016. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices) TI - The Long Arm of Moore’s Law: Microelectronics and American Science JF - Science and Public Policy DO - 10.1093/scipol/scx067 DA - 2017-12-21 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-long-arm-of-moore-s-law-microelectronics-and-american-science-90yPBKEOpv SP - 1 EP - 290 VL - Advance Article IS - 2 DP - DeepDyve ER -