Morris Chang fails his MIT doctoral examination twice, takes a job for one dollar a month more than Ford offered, and at fifty-four, passed over in Dallas, goes to Taiwan to build a factory that prints other people's chips. The business was only possible because Lynn Conway, sacked by IBM in 1968 and working under a new name, had made chip design something a student could learn in a term. How a circuit is printed with light, why only one Dutch firm makes the press, and what two governments are now doing about it.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Morris Chang, Lynn Conway, Carver Mead, K. T. Li, Ren Zhengfei, Fang Binxing, Allen Zhang, Robin Li
- The idea it builds
- A chip is printed with light through a stencil; the wavelength sets the finest line, which is why the light kept getting bluer.