The Hindu Business Line : Taking a trip into the past

Pallab Chatterjee played a major role in developing a solution to a problem that memory chipmakers were then faced with: Limited availability of surface.

What does S. Ramadorai see when he crystal-gazes? "I see the excited anticipation of the next big boom waiting to happen," he writes in the introduction to Sand to Silicon by Shivanand Kanavi, from Rupa (www.rupapublications.com) .

"Very simply put, more and more things will get digital. This digitisation means that a host of different devices and services will talk the same language," forecasts Ramadorai.

The book is `an excursion into the past' to narrate `the amazing story of digital technology', especially to those who are curious to know what lies behind the boxes, be they PCs (personal computers) or modems. And to those who want to know `how microchips, computers, telecom, and the Internet came into being'.

Also, to the avid, who are looking for answers to questions such as: "Who were the key players and what were their key contributions? What were the underlying concepts in this complex set of technologies? What is the digital technology that is leading to the convergence of computers, communication, media, movies, music and education? Who have been the Indian scientists and technologists who played a significant role in this global saga... ?"

Do you know, for instance, that Jagdish Chandra Bose created a semiconductor microwave detector in the 1890s, when experimenting with electromagnetic waves? Bose called it `coherer'. Made of an iron-mercury compound, it was `the first solid-state device to be used,' says the book. Bose demonstrated his invention at the Royal Institution in London in 1897. "Guglielmo Marconi used a version of the coherer in his first wireless radio in 1897."

Wikipedia has an elaborate page on Bose where you'd find this snatch: "Bose went to London on a lecture tour in 1896 and met Marconi, who was conducting wireless experiments for the British post office. In an interview, Bose said he was not interested in commercial telegraphy and others can use his research work."

Neville Mott, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his contributions to solid-state electronics, remarked that J.C. Bose was `at least 60 years ahead of his time' and that in fact, Bose had `anticipated the existence of P-type and N-type semiconductors'.

Fast forward to read about another Indian, Pallab Chatterjee. In the 1970s, when working in Texas Instruments, he played a major role in developing a solution to a problem that memory chipmakers were then faced with: Limited availability of surface. In Chatterjee's words, "The dilemma was, should we build skyscrapers or should we dig underground into the substrate and build basements and subways?"

What was the answer? `Trenching' technology to pack in more micro transistors per square centimetre. "This deep sub-micron technology resulted in the capacity of memory chips leapfrogging from kilobytes to megabytes. Texas Instruments was the first to introduce a 4 MB (megabyte) DRAM (dynamic random access memory), back in 1985." A big advance in miniaturisation, in those days, notes Kanavi.

Chatterjee was to collaborate with Krishna Saraswat of Stanford University to bring about `changes in manufacturing techniques that made the whole US chip industry competitive'. Saraswat is working these days on reducing the time taken by signals to travel between chips and even within chips, says Kanavi. "The `interconnects' between chips can become the limiting factor to chip speeds, even before problems are faced at the nano-physics level," reads a quote of Saraswat in the book.

Just a sampler of what can be the right read for an afternoon this weekend.

After high-impact/low-probability disruptions

The incident was to affect two Scandinavian companies, Nokia and Ericsson, which accounted for 40 per cent of the affected orders at the plant.

Disasters can occur any time, we know. But how to overcome vulnerability and thus achieve competitive advantage? Yossi Sheffi offers helpful insights in The Resilient Enterprise, from Pearson (www.pearsoned.co.in) . "A notion borrowed from the materials sciences, resilience represents the ability of a material to recover its original shape following a deformation," explains the author in the preface.

"For companies, resilience measures their ability to, and the speed at which they can, return to their normal performance level following a high-impact/low-probability disruption."

The book opens with a bolt of lightning that struck an industrial building of Philips in the desert city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Friday night, March 17, 2000. "The furnace in Fabricator No. 22 caught fire. Immediately, alarms sounded inside the Philips plant and at the local fire station. Sprinklers went off and Philips-trained staffers rushed into action. In less than 10 minutes, the fire was out."

When the firefighters arrived, they had nothing to do, except `walk in and check it out'. Though the incident did not even appear in Albuquerque newspapers, it was to affect two Scandinavian companies, Nokia and Ericsson, which accounted for 40 per cent of the affected orders at the plant.

How so? Because the blaze-hit plant hit was a fab, or a semiconductor fabrication plant. "Inside the damaged furnace, eight trays of wafers were immediately ruined. With hundreds of chips per eight-inch diameter wafer, each tray of wafers represented thousands of cell-phones worth of production."

Worse things had happened: "Smoke had spread throughout the facility - further than Philips realised. As staffers rushed to deal with the blaze and as firefighters tramped through the facility on their inspection, their shoes tracked in dirt. The smoke, the soot, and the tramping of staffers and firefighters left the clean-room facilities anything but clean."

The resulting contamination ruined wafers in almost every stage of production, destroying millions of cell-phones' worth of chips in those few minutes, narrates Sheffi.

More than 5,000 miles away, in Finland, the scale of disaster was to dawn on Nokia a few weeks later: `that the disrupted supplies would prevent the production of some four million handsets' representing more than 5 per cent of the company's annual production `during a time of booming cell-phone sales'.

So, what did Nokia do? `A team of supply chain managers, chip designers, and senior managers from across Nokia' was formed `to attach the problem'... `thirty Nokia officials fanned out over Europe, Asia, and the US to patch together a solution'...

Racy stuff for the resilient.

Tailpiece

"Disaster!"

"What? Computer crash?"

"No, the boss has cancelled his leave!"