Word: silicones
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...future, industrial might will flow increasingly from the power to make things small: the microscopic electrical circuits that form the core of computers, calculators, missile control panels, televisions, video games and all other electronic products. Called semiconductors, these circuits are most commonly etched in invisibly intricate detail on thin silicon chips as small as a baby's fingernail. Marvels in miniature, the chips can execute commands, perform complex calculations and store libraries of information. What iron and steel were to the Industrial Revolution, semiconductors are to the Electronic...
...recently was the industry standard. For U.S. chipmakers, who have watched the Japanese cripple the American auto, steel and television industries, the 64K strike was ominous. Says W.J. Sanders III, chairman of Advanced Micro Devices, one of the many semiconductor firms that have sprouted in Northern California's Silicon Valley: "This highly successful, productive U.S. industry, the leading edge of this country's economic future, is hurting...
...Japanese firms dropped the cost of a 64K RAM from about $23 to as low as $5, and it has stayed at roughly the same level this year. Though major American electronics companies like Motorola can afford to match that kind of price, the smaller, more specialized Silicon Valley firms like Intel and National Semiconductor are more hard-pressed to stay competitive...
...Propulsion Laboratory (2,700 scientists and engineers) is famed throughout the world and perhaps beyond. Since the 1958 launch of Explorer I, the first U.S. satellite, it has sent some 40 spacecraft soaring into the cosmos. The J.P.L.'s sophisticated machines, operating on complex instructions stored in silicon brains, have explored every member of the sun's family of planets, from inner-most Mercury to the remote giant Saturn. Even now a J.P.L. robot is speeding toward Uranus, 1.7 billion miles away, for a 1986 photographic reconnaissance...
...here is quite enough: a vision of dark, cramped, urban squalor. This is Los Angeles in the year 2019, when most of the earth's inhabitants have colonized other planets, and only a polyglot refuse heap of humanity remains. Los Angeles is a Japanized nighttown of sleaze and silicon, fetid steam and perpetual rain. This baroque Tomorrowland juggles images from a dozen yesterdays: walk out of the rain and into a 1940s world of overhead fan blades and women in shoulder-pad jackets moving to the cadence of a keening alto sax. The filthy streets are clogged with Third...