Semiconductors are to the information age what engines are to the industrial age. Chips are the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, and the fractional horsepower engine rolled up into one. The Chip History Center is dedicated to preserving that history for future generations.

Learn

Title	Summary	Relevant date	Last updated
A Brief History of Electr ...	200 years of deposition technology		28 Aug 2017
A History Timeline of Aut ...	A special presentation of The Chip History Center on History Timeline of Automatic Test Equipment	15 Jun 2006	29 Aug 2017
Advertise your company’ ...	You will never get ink from a magazine to burn mind share with your company’s name...		21 Jul 2021
Advertising in Tech: what ...	Advertising should be primarily used for imprinting your brand on the minds of senior executives a ...	15 Jun 2005	24 Feb 2021
Align your core strengths	Align your core strengths, manufacturing, product portfolio, message, and targeting carefully		16 Feb 2021
Always give product or co ...	Naming can be an important factor in achieving market success or it can lead down the path to mark ...		26 Jan 2021
Average vs Great Leaders	The average leader retreats to the safety of marcom and IR tricks and denials when surprised by a ...		30 Jul 2021
Bill Tobey on Bringing th ...	Bill Tobey interview on his conceptualizing the wafer stepper in the late 1970s	06 Dec 2006	31 Jul 2017
Branding word choice will ...	Words matter. Words imprint in the brain with the images they create. It is a general observation ...		21 Jul 2021
Budgets and risk avoidanc ...	If you think back to the days when today’s giants were small, the focus was not on budgets, but ...		19 Mar 2021
Bunny Suit History in Sem ...	In 1968, standard clean room practices were lax. Facilities were kept reasonably clean, but employ ...	24 May 2018	24 May 2018
CEOs must make on-the-spo ...	Advantest, JSR, and TEL: Why they were so successful when so many others failed.		19 Jan 2021
Competition never sleeps	It is a basic principle of tactical awareness that the competition never sleeps. You must assume t ...		19 May 2021
Confuse the customer with ...	Never believe that naming is trivial. It’s the first thing people must remember before they dec ...		21 Jul 2021
Dave Markle: Ultratech/Pe ...	Dave Markle, Senior Vice President & Chief Technical Officer at Ultratech, describes what math and ...		22 Oct 2019
Define and refine your Co ...	This seems obvious. It’s so obvious that it is a strategic error that many companies make. First ...		16 Feb 2021
Develop products on needs ...	Then, wants and features will drop out. Don’t confuse the two. A need can be identified becaus ...		08 Jan 2021
Disruptive products start ...	It is a common mistake in tech to approach product development from a classical marketing position ...		26 Jan 2021
Elephants can innovate	Does real innovation only occur in small companies? Not true: here are some big companies that hav ...		19 Jan 2021
Excellence: How Japanâ� ...	How some Japanese companies thrived in spite of the many challenges of the lost decades.	01 Jun 1995	26 Oct 2018
Gary Patton: What Math & ...	Gary Patton never knew he wanted to be a scientist when he was a kid.		22 Oct 2019
High-tech business struct ...	High-tech business structure is fundamentally different from the B-School classics. The old style ...		07 Feb 2021
HOW A CHIP IS MADE	How We Do It . . .		01 Aug 2017
How a semiconductor wafer ...	It Really Does Start With Sand . . . This series of images show how silicon wafers are made from s ...		29 Aug 2017
How Japan Lost its Semico ...	The 5 strategic causes behind the long-term failure of Japan’s Semiconductor industry are c ...	25 Jul 1992	28 Oct 2019
How KLA has keeps moving ...	Few companies have accelerated the industry as much as KLA has.	24 May 2019	24 May 2019
HOW THE TRANSISTOR WORKS	Microprocessors are essential to many of the products we use every day such as televisions, cars, ...		30 Jun 2017
How the U.S. beat Japan i ...	The source of Japan’s failure to move forward is mostly about the failure of their Theory Z mana ...	17 Aug 2012	19 May 2021
HOW TO BUILD A DINOSAUR	Dr. Jack Horner, “The Dinosaur Guy,” describes the biological challenges in building a ...		30 Jun 2017
IBM’s Design For Manufa ...	Why does IBM have a semiconductor group when the biggest advancements in computing power are comin ...	15 Jun 2007	29 Apr 2021
IBM’s R&D Partnering Mo ...	IBM’s R&D partnering model is one of the great business process innovations of the semiconductor ...	15 Jan 2010	07 Feb 2021
If you apply classical ma ...	It’s not that classical marketing is totally ineffective. But it is only marginally so. The re ...		02 Jun 2021
Images in Semiconductor H ...	Key events drawn from archived documents in VLSI's library. These documents have been carefully se ...	16 Jun 2008	09 Aug 2019
Intel’s Branding Strate ...	One of the most important Maxims of Hi-Tech is to never confuse customers with names. This is some ...		24 Mar 2021
Intel’s Branding Strate ...	One of the most important Maxims of Hi-Tech is to never confuse customers with names. This is some ...	15 Jun 2007	29 Apr 2021
Introduction to Maxims of ...	How to thrive in the extreme sport of business: These maxims compile much of the wisdom G Dan Hutc ...		28 Dec 2020
It is a strategic princip ...	Misalignment of external and internal communications is a common leadership failure. They are oft ...		21 Jul 2021
It’s always about bad o ...	Every corporate problem is ultimately a management or leadership issue. If it isn’t, a company ...		19 Jan 2021
JUST HOW DEEP DO CHIP VIA ...	Semiconductor engineers must figure out how to etch deep and very narrow trenches. Etching is like ...		29 Aug 2017
KULICKE & SOFFA: WIRE BON ...	Ever wonder how the nanochips you see in pictures wind up covered in plastic on a printed circuit ...	15 Jun 2006	22 Aug 2017
Leadership Principles and ...	The underlying principles and purpose of their leaders govern the outcome of all marketing battles ...		09 Mar 2021
Leading is a top line fun ...	The greatest industry leaders are invariably remembered for their ability to grow revenues, not ma ...		09 Mar 2021
Lithography tool and comp ...	One has to look way back to find a lithography tool transition as major as the move to EUV. Few pe ...	31 Mar 2016	28 Jun 2019
Look like a duck: How Int ...	Look like a duck: cool and collected on the surface, while paddling hard underneath. But never st ...		30 Jul 2021
Math, Science, & our Coun ...	Charlie Sporck explains why Math and Science are important for the economy and the society as a wh ...	07 Nov 2007	22 Oct 2019
Math, Science, & Your Fut ...	Sound Boring? Hear how very successful people have used Math & Science to make their lives wild, f ...	27 Apr 2006	31 Jul 2017
Memory Gluts: Will the DR ...	TTID: This Time it’s Different or Time-to-Imminent-Disaster?		20 Aug 2018
Minds & Machines: Do You ...	Making chips is about driving machines better than a Formula 1 to their limit.		22 Oct 2019
Monetization - The first ...	When does the innovation clock start: With the idea, with the first paper, with the first alpha to ...		28 Dec 2020
Moore's Law 101: The Math ...	Moore’s Law has morphed into many things over its life. But what is it … Really! Her ...	19 Apr 1965	02 Oct 2017
Moore's Law and the race ...	How the continuation of Moore’s law provides a foundation for future economic growth; how i ...	15 Nov 2006	02 Oct 2017
Moore’s Law GDP Va ...	How the Moore’s Law raises income in relationship to the economies of the United States and ...	13 Feb 2015	21 Oct 2019
More on principles and pu ...	The underlying principles and purpose of their leaders govern the outcome of all businesses.		09 Mar 2021
Partnering only happens w ...	The difference between partnering and purchasing is that partnering can only happen when both part ...		07 May 2021
Power projection in your ...	Power projection must be a fundamental part of your company’s strategy		30 Jul 2021
Price – It’s not the ...	It is a common error to think that price is the first decision point for a buyer. Now in a B2C ‘ ...		08 Jan 2021
Pricing is a function of ...	Pricing of undeveloped products is one of the biggest issues for companies in high technology. Th ...		26 Jan 2021
R&D is your future, SG&A ...	In general, robbing SG&A to invest in R&D promotes growth in a healthy technology company. Doing t ...		16 Feb 2021
Risk versus Uncertainty i ...	Risk is when an outcome’s probability is known. Uncertainty is when an outcome’s probability ...		08 Jan 2021
Rubylith mask-making econ ...	Ever wonder what economic impact mask technology innovation has had? Any idea of how long it would ...	07 Dec 2018	24 May 2019
SALES versus MARKETING	"SALES is persuading the Customer to WANT what we HAVE. MARKETING is being sure we HAVE what the C ...		07 Feb 2021
Segment products and mark ...	One of the greatest problems in marketing is effectively communicating the differences between pro ...		06 Apr 2021
Sell yourself, your compa ...	When it comes to big ticket capital items, the customer is not just buying a product, they are mak ...		24 Mar 2021
Semiconductor Companies o ...	Consolidation in the Semiconductor Industry is strange because of the way the industry has been bi ...	22 Feb 2013	19 May 2021
Silicon Valley’s W ...	Silicon Valley's Upstarts versus the World		26 Oct 2018
Tech Business Strategy ve ...	Most confuse the two and in reality I doubt there is any formal definition for marketing. In mili ...		24 Mar 2021
Tech businesses need Prod ...	If you approach product development as a task of managing you invariably introduce products that w ...		21 Jul 2021
The 3 business integratio ...	Of the three business integration models: Horizontal, Vertical, and Matrix, matrix is the most pow ...		21 Jul 2021
The 5 Business Strategies	There are only five business strategies: cost, quality, distribution, technology, and intellectual ...		24 Mar 2021
The company’s name is i ...	If you think you can lose a lot by misnaming your product, imagine what happens when you misname y ...		24 Feb 2021
The DRAM crash of 2008	How the 2007-2008 financial crisis that led to the great recession ignited a crash in semiconducto ...	02 Jan 2008	10 Aug 2018
The lady bug and the micr ...	This is a children's story about Little Lil the ladybug and her journey across a silicon wafer and ...		23 May 2019
The stock will take care ...	This is something our industry’s marketing legend, Bob Graham, used to say whenever his people g ...	15 Jun 1988	07 Feb 2021
The Three Traits of Great ...	When I think back on the best leaders I have ever had the pleasure to know there are three basic t ...		02 Jun 2021
Tunneling through a compe ...	Tunneling through a competitor’s pricing walls is a very effective strategy. AMD successfully u ...		06 Apr 2021
Using Math & Science and ...	Per-Ove Hansson on using Math & Science and getting paid good money to see the world.		22 Oct 2019
What Math & Science Can D ...	Mike Polcari, CEO of SEMATECH, describes how he built a career in math and science, what it”� ...		31 Aug 2017
What Math & Science Have ...	Debbora Ahlgren describes what math and science have done for her. Find out why she never gave up ...	01 Jan 2011	22 Oct 2019
What Math & Science Have ...	Lisa Su, VP of IBM's Semiconductor Research & Development Center, describes what math and science ...		28 Aug 2017
What Math & Science Have ...	Mark Bohr, Intel Senior Fellow, describes what math and science have done for him. Find out why th ...		22 Oct 2019
WHAT'S A BUNNY SUIT?	Find out what it's like to be working in the clean room.		22 Aug 2017
What's ALD? A children's ...	Did you know that the chip makers routinely make films one atom at a time? It's called Atomic Laye ...		29 Aug 2017
Why big companies don’t ...	It is a mistake to believe that risk aversion or the tendency for meeting quarterly numbers to alw ...		19 Mar 2021
Winners take ownership of ...	No one ever fixed a problem that wasn’t theirs. Problems are opportunities, so blaming others l ...		28 Dec 2020
Yan Borodovsky: Breaking ...	Ever wonder how innovation really happens? Think it's someone sitting back and dreaming up an idea ...	13 Sep 2007	22 Oct 2019

Access to and use of this Website is subject to VLSI's Terms of Use (including Copyright Policy & Claims) and Privacy Policy. By accessing or using this Website you agree to VLSI's Terms of Use (including Copyright Policy & Claims) and Privacy Policy.