One popular Soviet joke from the 1980s recounted a Kremlin official who declared proudly, “Comrade, we have built the world’s biggest microprocessor!”

The USSR’s “copy it” strategy had actually benefitted the United States, guaranteeing the Soviets faced a continued technological lag.

Sony excelled by identifying new markets and targeting them with impressive products using Silicon Valley’s newest circuitry technology. “Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want,” Morita declared. “The public does not know what is possible, but we do.”

“Imagine, Nikita Sergeyevich,” Shokin told the Soviet leader one day, “that a TV can be made the size of a cigarette box.” Such was the promise of Soviet silicon.

bet it would soon be cheaper to design a standardized logic chip that, coupled with a powerful memory chip programmed with different types of software, could compute many different things. After all, Hoff knew, no one was building memory chips more powerful than Intel’s.

Sony, which was unique among Japanese semiconductor firms in never betting heavily on DRAMs, succeeded in developing innovative new products, like specialized chips for image sensors. When photons strike their silicon, these chips create electric charges that are correlated to the strength of the light, letting the chips convert images into digital

idea of separating chip design and manufacturing had therefore already been percolating in Taiwan for several years before Minister K. T. Li offered Morris Chang a blank check to build Taiwan’s chip industry.

Minister Li followed through on his promise to find the money for the business plan Chang drew up. The Taiwanese government provided 48 percent of the startup capital for TSMC, stipulating only that Chang find a foreign chip firm to provide advanced production technology. He was turned down by his former colleagues at TI and by Intel. “Morris,

Toshiba, a DRAM giant, a mid-ranking factory manager named Fujio Masuoka developed a new type of memory chip in 1981 that, unlike DRAM, could continue “remembering” data even after it was powered off. Toshiba ignored this discovery, so it was Intel that brought this new type of memory chip, commonly called “flash” or NAND, to market. The biggest