Chips and Change: How Crisis Reshapes the Semiconductor Industry

For decades the semiconductor industry has been a driver of global economic growth and social change. Semiconductors, particularly the microchips essential to most electronic devices, have transformed computing, communications, entertainment, and industry. In Chips and Change, Clair Brown and Greg Linden trace the industry over more than twenty years through eight technical and competitive crises that forced it to adapt in order to continue its exponential rate of improved chip performance. The industry's changes have in turn shifted the basis on which firms hold or gain global competitive advantage.These eight interrelated crises do not have tidy beginnings and ends. Most, in fact, are still ongoing, often in altered form. The U.S. semiconductor industry's fear that it would be overtaken by Japan in the 1980s, for example, foreshadows current concerns over the new global competitors China and India. The intersecting crises of rising costs for both design and manufacturing are compounded by consumer pressure for lower prices. Other crises discussed in the book include the industry's steady march toward the limits of physics, the fierce competition that keeps its profits modest even as development costs soar, and the global search for engineering talent.Other high-tech industries face crises of their own, and the semiconductor industry has much to teach about how industries are transformed in response to such powerful forces as technological change, shifting product markets, and globalization. Chips and Change also offers insights into how chip firms have developed, defended, and, in some cases, lost global competitive advantage.

About the Author :
Greg Linden is a a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Work, Technology and Society, University of California, Berkeley.

Review :
""Chips and Change" makes an important contribution to understanding the intensifying global competition for leadership in one of the world's most strategic industries. This book will help demystify the complexities of the semiconductor world for a nonprofessional audience. A must-read."--George M. Scalise, President, Semiconductor Industry Association ""Chips and Change" provides a rich up-to-date analysis of the competitiveness of US producers in a critical high-tech industry and demonstrates how firm strategy and government policy combine to create global advantage. The authors analyze how the semiconductor industry's responses to eight different crises since the mid 1980s have affected workers, consumers, and national economies in a world in which more nations are trying to stake out a place in the high-tech landscape."--Laura Tyson, S.K. and Angela Chan Chair Chair in Global Management, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and Chair, Council of Economic Advisors (1993-1995) and Chair, National Economic Council (1995-1996) "Brown and Linden provide a brilliant analysis of the competitive crisis facing the United States. They explain the underlying issues by detailing the challenges that the semiconductor industry has faced. These challenges are not different from what all hi-tech industries will face in the globalized world. This book is a must-read for U.S policymakers."--Vivek Wadhwa, senior research associate, Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School, and Executive in Residence/Adjunct Professor, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University "If you are involved in the challenges of the semiconductor industry, this is a book you should read."-- Paul McLellan, "Electronic Design News" "It might be thought that being at the forefront of technology, in an industry with very rapid technological development, is a sure way to fame and fortune. But Brown and Linden show that the semiconductor industry for the last thirty years has faced eight different types of crisis. They show that living with Moore's Law is not easy. Brown and Linden's careful on-the-spot research provides the rich detail that we need to understand technological change, especially at its most rapidly evolving frontier. "Chips and Change" is the book that everyone has been looking for."--George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2001 "No other major industry has the severe ups and downs of the global semiconductor industry. While microchips play a major role in every aspect of modern life, the industry has given participants a roller-coaster ride since the invention of the microchip in the late 1950s. Brown and Linden, two experts who have followed the industry for decades, capture the excitement of the ride in terms of a series of industry crises and provide a wealth of data-driven information that they use to give some lessons for the future. This book will be of interest to all who follow this dynamic industry."--Bill Spencer, Chairman Emeritus, SEMATECH " "If you are involved in the challenges of the semiconductor industry, this is a book you should read." Paul McLellan Electronic Design News