Take away the semiconductor, and all of electronics, all of it!

Televisionpoint.com Special by N T Nair of CMS Computers
'Take away the semiconductor, and all of electronics, all of it!, collapses along with all the world’s economies', said Nick Holonyak, University of Illinois professor and inventor of the red Light Emitting Diode (LED).

Today, we are in the thick of a number of economic waves, Knowledge Economy, Hydrogen Economy, Attention Economy, each one with its domain of fervent activity. If we deeply probe these economic landscapes, the strong presence of 'Semiconductors’ in all of them would be clearly visible.

For the uninitiated, here is a peek into the world of semiconductors. The term 'semiconductor’ refers to a set of elements like silicon, germanium, zinc etc which are added with minute quantities of special impurities, called dopants. This doping alters the atomic structure of the element, say, of silicon, to enable it to work either as a conductor or nonconductor of electricity, depending upon the polarity of electric charge applied to it. Devices like diodes, transistors and their clusters, like Integrated Circuits (ICs), microprocessors etc are formed out of such semiconductors, mostly silicon.

These devices, in fact, are working inside our TVs, radios, mobiles, carrying out their respective functions. Over the years, semiconductor technology has advanced in such a mind-boggling way that a typical microprocessor working as the Central processing Unit (CPU) in charge of all the computing operations in our Personal computer (PC) today contain several million transistors in that single IC.

The Knowledge Economy, the foremost in the economic wave, uses knowledge as power, controlling the economies of countries. Developed countries thrive on their knowledge power, built up through large-scale application of science and technology in various sectors. Computers and telecom networks are the key technologies driving the knowledge economy, and they are all totally semiconductor-dependent. Every computer, be it a PC, server or mainframe, is a hotbed of silicon chips. Same is the case with the modems, computer networking as well as the telecommunication networking gear working in unison, enabling knowledge creation, collation and dissemination processes.

The Hydrogen Economy, waiting in the wings for a big takeoff, promises an ecofriendly future when electricity will be locally generated in each home through fuel cells, for which the fuels are the hydrogen and the oxygen taken from free air. Automobiles too will be fuel-cell operated in the near future, with their inherent advantages. In this economic activity also, semiconductors would be playing a very vital role in handling control functions and many other chores.

The Attention Economy refers to the economic activity based on the attention we bestow to Internet sites, TV programmes and the like. In return for our need to collect information from Websites, or entertainment from TV or radio, we are made to devote our attention to the advertisements flashed as banners, interludes or in other forms.

Here too, computers and its networks supporting the Internet activity are totally semiconductor-enabled. TV and radio, the other lead-players in the attention economy, also have all their systems and gadgets embedded with silicon chips . The broadcasting gear of TV and radio also have semiconductors doing their jobs inside them.

The significance of semiconductors as the enabling technology today in all the major sectors of human activity cannot be underrated. Positively, it is the 'semiconductor economy' which is the core of all other economies in action today.