Silicon Insider: Why Chips Still Rule

March 26 -- There's a reason they call it Silicon Valley.

There are two basic truths about the world of high tech:

1) Before and after everything, it is always about the chips; and

2) Everybody forgets that fact.

You see, chips haven't been sexy in a long time. Microprocessors excepted, the semiconductor industry hasn't really been exciting since the mid-Sixties.

That's when the wild young men of Fairchild ran the hottest company on Earth, drank too much, got rich, crashed the company, and then ran off to found more than one hundred new chip companies … and create the modern Valley.

These "Fairchildren" were the men who founded Intel, National Semiconductor, AMD and the others. But though many went on to immense wealth and considerable honors, their days as pop stars were over by the mid-Seventies. They were supplanted by a new generation: PC revolutionaries such as Jobs and Wozniak, and video game pioneer Nolan Bushnell.

Since then, tech has enjoyed at least a half-dozen other celebrated groups of entrepreneurs, each corresponding to a hot new electronics industry, from workstations to Web sites. Each has been heralded as the Next Big Thing, and has experienced a meteoric rise and an equally precipitous crash.

The most recent of these, of course, was the dot-com bubble. The Valley became so synonymous with e-commerce that more than one commentator asked if the "Silicon" in the title was obsolete.

But Valley veterans knew better: they understood that the dot-com boom, like all the ones before it, only reconfirmed the pre-eminence of chips.

Moore's Law and the Binary Chip Economy

I once wrote that if, in 1965, you had wanted to predict what the U.S. would look like at the turn of the Millennium, the best indicator would not have been demographics, social patterns, cycles of history or the prognostications of the leading futurists — but rather Moore's Law on the development of semiconductors.

Once you understood the implications of chip power doubling every 18-24 months, you would have realized we were in for some kind of wild economic ride.