Rating: 
Summary: Quick and entertaining tour
Review: "The Chip" attempts to pack a lot of history and a lot of ideas into a very short 260-odd pages. For the most part, it succeeds. The reader gets just enough history on boolean logic, Thomas Edison, and vacuum tubes to appreciate the astounding achievment of the first monolithic circuit without feeling overwhelmed by the technical details. But, this book is more than technological history; it also chronicles the personalities of the men who invented the machines, Kilby and (independently) Noyce. The politics of the chip are also covered, e.g., patent infringements (it took years to settle who invented the concept) and American efforts to beat back Japanese incursion into the chip market in the 1970s and 80s.The depth of the treatments of all of these subjects is just enough to tell you what you need to know about the major events and players, though I have to admit, in many places I would have willingly accepted more detail. I have the feeling that the book could have easily been twice as long if Reid had wanted it to be and I probably wouldn't have minded at all.
Rating: 
Summary: The Chip
Review: An interesting book, full of good explanations of the science, along with glimpses of the personalities of the scientists. Useful to people (scientists and non-scientists)interested in learning a little about the history and operation of chips. Easy to read and understand - and written in an engaging style. Full of accurate information, contrary to the unsupported assertion of the unhappy Grinnell graduate. (Grinnell reputedly is a fine school - probably undeserving of the opinion most will hold based on the graduate having submitted a rating for a book without having read the book - submitted on the basis of being angry over a comment the author made on tv.)
Rating:
Summary: An exciting book for an exciting subject
Review: At the very outset of the review I must warn that I am a techie so my review is biased. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It conveys the excitement of the really exciting invention made. The invention has revolutionized the electronic industry. Noyce and Kilby are a couple of the few people who have revolutionized our lives but little mention is made of them. Instead our media and culture has ignored these people totally apart from a passing mention or a brief media hype. I would encourage everyone to read this book for the inspiration it provides.
Rating:
Summary: It takes a polymath to know a polymath
Review: I am referring to Mr. T. R. Reid. His book, The Chip, is a tour de force that takes the reader on a journey at once historical and cerebral-, even spiritual. This absorbing account of the mircoelectronics revolution integrates (among other subjects): the biographies of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, the counting systems of ancient Babylonians and Myans, the arcane ideas of 19th century mathematician George Boole, solid state physics, statistics, politics, patent law, and an Alice story. Reid interconnects people and ideas from varied disciplines as elegantly as the silcon chip integrates the varied components of the electronic circuit. So The Chip is both an exposition of a type of physical integration and itself a demonstration of another, a more general type of the thing it describes. Readers from diverse backgrounds should be stimulated on one or more levels by The Chip. I sincerely hope the book could find its way on the required reading list of High Schools across the country. For this book is about America and for America, weaving together larger themes of individualism, optimism, innovation, amelioration, and, most of all, wonder. It is at once guidebook and soul food, leading, nurturing, sustaining..., lighting up the fires of the creative imagination. So follow this torchlight of a review and pass into the rich and dazzling realm of The Chip.
Rating:
Summary: A dumies guide to the history of modern electronics
Review: I found this book to be helpful and informative. It does a good job of explaining the Ideas, thoughts, history, and science behind one of today greatest enigmas the micro chip. Things like why did we have to switch to integrated circuits? Who came up with the idea? I found it to be an excelent source on the co-inventors Kilby and Noyce. The author does a good job of making the history lessons engaging. Few people have even the slightest idea what really goes on in the electronic devices we take for granted. This books goes a long way toward filling that gap of knowledge, and I encourage any one that is even slightly curious to read it.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent introduction and history
Review: I recommend this book highly for anyone who wants a good introduction to the technical and political evolution of a modern societal revolution. Semiconductors and the subsequent development of integrated circuitry have fundamentally altered the way we conduct ourselves on a day to day basis. We need no better example than Amazon.com itself.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointed
Review: I was disappointed in this book,which I read after I saw the author on C-Span's Book TV. The material would have made a good magazine article. The actual invention of the intergrated circuit was given short shift. A better treatment of this subject and a better book in general was Crystal Fire, which was about the invention of the transistor.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't put it down - Real American Heroes.
Review: Technophobes might as well move on to the next review. I loved this book. It explained in clear, precise language how innumerable barriers were overcome by innovative and insightfully brilliant individuals to create a device that revolutionized our lives. I've always been fascinated by electronics, built my own radios and earned an amateur radio license in 7th grade, just because the subject and theory of how electrons move around to perform useful functions is intriguing. Reid has captured much of that fascination and translated it into a great story. Before integrated circuits could be produced, the transistor had to be invented. Before that time, switching mechanism, required a vacuum tube to control, amplify and switch the flow of electrons through a circuit. It was the discovery that some semiconductor materials could be doped to have an excess of positive charges or negative charges that provided the breakthrough. A strip of germanium could be doped at each end with differing charges leaving a junction in the middle. The junction worked like a turnstile that could control the flow of current when connected to a battery. Variations in current across these junctions connected in the transistor formation could rectify (prevent current from flowing in both directions) and amplify. That's all that's needed to make a radio (I'm oversimplifying obviously) and hundreds of other devices. Transistors required vastly less current than vacuum tubes, were almost infinitely stable, were cheap and gave off little heat. But, transistors required thousands of connections to the wires coming in order to make a useful circuit, and as demands for more complex circuitry arose the wiring became infinitely complex. This interconnection problem became a huge barrier that could have prevented the effective utilization of the advantages of the transistor "You read everything. . . You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful," remembers Jack Kilby, one of the inventors of the integrated circuit. He also insists that he is not a scientist but an engineer. "A scientist is motivated by knowledge; he basically wants to explain something. An engineer's drive is to solve problems, to make something work. . . . Reid has elegantly interwoven the biographies of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. One of the delights of the book was learning how the two inventors thought, how they proceeded, and why they went in the directions they did. Robert Noyce, founder of Intel, had developed a process to make transistors in arrays on a silicon wafer. They cut apart the transistors and then hired "thousands of women with tweezers to pick them up and try to wire them together. It just seemed so stupid." He, too, realized the tyranny of interconnection numbers. What they both came up with was the "Monolithic Idea." The notion that an entire circuit could be designed and produced on those silicon chips. Obviously, there is little suspense in the story, but Reid captures and holds our attention. Both men accomplished the same feat at about the same time, approaching it from different directions. Kilby showed how the transistors could be placed on a single wafer and Noyce showed how the chips and circuits could be manufactured. Every transistor radio used the patent Kilby was awarded for his work. In so doing, he turned the future that Orwell had predicted in 1984 on its head. Instead of a monolithic centralization of power in the hands of a few computer elite who controlled all the computing power, "the mass distribution of microelectronics had spawned a massive decentralization of computing power. In the real 1984, millions of ordinary people could match the governmental or corporate computer bit for bit. In the real 1984, the stereotypical computer user had become a Little Brother seated at the keyboard to write his seventh-grade science report." The social impact was enormous. Slide rules that had been ubiquitous were completely eliminated in just a few years by the handheld calculator that has become so cheap it is often given away in promotions. The Japanese gained virtual control over the memory chip industry because of the way they handled their work force. Americans had a monopoly until the 1973 recession. American companies typically lay off workers to save money during downturns. The Japanese try to keep their work force employed. This meant that when the demand for chips exploded, Americans did not have the capacity to produce enough to meet the demand. The Japanese, having trained workers available, met that demand and were able to produce enough at such a volume to keep the price so low as to inhibit any competition. That and their emphasis on high quality gained them 42% of the world market by 1980. The "Anderson Bombshell" report of 1980 (Anderson was a manager at Hewlett-Packard) that showed that Japanese chips were far more reliable than those made in the United States helped seal their market share. It took winning the Nobel Prize for Noyce and Kilby to be recognized in the United States (Japan, a nation that honors its engineers, had awarded Noyce and Kilby numerous accolades over the years.) The final irony remains that in "our media-soaked society, with its insatiable appetite for important, or at least interesting, personalities, has somehow managed to overlook a pair of genuine national heroes- two Americans who had a good idea that has improved the daily lot of the world."
Rating:
Summary: how to turn an invention into a boxing match
Review: The writing is reasonably engaging and does its best to attract general interest to a technical subject. However the tactics with which it does so are more National Enquirer than New York Times. The author decides to choose sides in the debate over who invented the microchip, and delivers pages of invective to support his position. The industry, in contrast, recognized both Kilby and Noyce as inventors and paid royalties to both companies they worked for. In short, the author tries to retroactively arrange a boxing match between the inventors, while the co-inventors in reality cordially shook hands and agreed to split the profits. The intensely partisan presentation of the story in this book is a gross offense to the characters of the inventors. In addition, the text is littered with errors. "A diode is a dam that blocks current under some conditions and opens it to let electricity flow when the conditions change" is a mighty vague way to say that diodes let current flow one direction and not the reverse. "Materials that have proven the best insulators are indeed those with eight outer electrons" flat out does not parse. Does the material have eight electrons? Is he trying to say that noble gases are the best insulators? "Elements with three or fewer outer electrons are conductors, and those with five or more are insulators" would come as a surprise to metals such as arsenic, antimony or selenium. "Shockley had a reputation for getting the most out of the people who worked for him". I won't even touch that one. "The process that eventually proved best - the process still used today in semiconductor manufacture - was a Bell Labs discovery called diffusion" has so many inaccuracies in one sentence it's hard to know where to start. One might as well say "Plumbing is a process that depends on leakage, a phenomenon invented by the Greeks." For all that, the book help personalize and make memorable the birth of the silicon chip. It occasionally does a very effective job of distilling the essence of a discovery. If taken with a grain of salt as a journalist's account of an engineering breakthrough, it will leave some lasting memories.
Rating:
Summary: how to turn an invention into a boxing match
Review: The writing is reasonably engaging and does its best to attract general interest to a technical subject. However the tactics with which it does so are more National Enquirer than New York Times. The author decides to choose sides in the debate over who invented the microchip, and delivers pages of invective to support his position. The industry, in contrast, recognized both Kilby and Noyce as inventors and paid royalties to both companies they worked for. In short, the author tries to retroactively arrange a boxing match between the inventors, while the co-inventors in reality cordially shook hands and agreed to split the profits. The intensely partisan presentation of the story in this book is a gross offense to the characters of the inventors. In addition, the text is littered with errors. "A diode is a dam that blocks current under some conditions and opens it to let electricity flow when the conditions change" is a mighty vague way to say that diodes let current flow one direction and not the reverse. "Materials that have proven the best insulators are indeed those with eight outer electrons" flat out does not parse. Does the material have eight electrons? Is he trying to say that noble gases are the best insulators? "Elements with three or fewer outer electrons are conductors, and those with five or more are insulators" would come as a surprise to metals such as arsenic, antimony or selenium. "Shockley had a reputation for getting the most out of the people who worked for him". I won't even touch that one. "The process that eventually proved best - the process still used today in semiconductor manufacture - was a Bell Labs discovery called diffusion" has so many inaccuracies in one sentence it's hard to know where to start. One might as well say "Plumbing is a process that depends on leakage, a phenomenon invented by the Greeks." For all that, the book help personalize and make memorable the birth of the silicon chip. It occasionally does a very effective job of distilling the essence of a discovery. If taken with a grain of salt as a journalist's account of an engineering breakthrough, it will leave some lasting memories.
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