semiconductor

I've never experienced life at the nanoscale, but that doesn't mean I can't reason about semiconductor physics.

First, yes this is semiconductor-based, which offers a few advantages over optical fiber technology.

Apparently this discovery is actually the first semiconductor white light laser, which is pretty neat - but not what the headline claims.

> I've never experienced life at the nanoscale, but that doesn't mean I can't reason about semiconductor physics.

Silicon Valley can probably be tied back all the way to fairchild semiconductor.

Developing stable materials for semiconductor usage is really expensive, and not terribly profitable.

It was called silicon valley because all the semiconductor companies were located there.

We already went through that scare and got the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984 to supplement what was already protected by patents.

That's happened with embedded and fabless semiconductor companies for quite a while.

For instance, the US saved its semiconductor industry (Intel, etc) from doom at the hands of the Japanese, by aggressive tariffs and other trade policies.

There's a poster of the 'Fairchildren' that inspired this one - that shows the explosion of companies from Fairchild Semiconductor (if anyone has a link, plz post it).

Certainly there's been extraordinary engineering that's gone into that shrinkage coupled with no small amount of semiconductor physics.

Motorola's semiconductor division was pretty much skipped from this story, their success in this area wasn't relevant to the "how they didn't make the iPhone" angle.