Now if all this is really as good as you make it
sound to be. For the consumers, it means cheaper and cheaper products but does it also mean
greater profits for the semi-conductor industry?

I think not all the companies will have greater profits but you, if you look at the fabulous companies like Intel or also Motorola, and please also look at IBM. People thought that IBM was on the verge of 'bankruptcy', but they have rebounded it in a remarkable thing. So European companies like the French company, the Germans' Siemens company was also in Singapore. You have to be on your toes.

It is a very, very tough business. It is very rapid in change and I experienced the first years in Silicon Valley and I thought 'Oh, this is a young industry and sometimes prices go up and prices come down'. Demand goes up and demand goes down like crazy. And I thought well at least in ten or fifteen years this industry will mature. No, not at all true. So it is still a very lively, very much oscillating type of industry- up and down difficult for everybody involved. Very difficult in fact. People get hired and fired especially in US but also in Asia, Japan and so on. So, it's not an easy thing and the consumer will eventually benefit from it.

Think of the low telephone rates, would have been totally impossible! It's not just the lawyers who did this and the politicians but they relied on very interesting new developments like the glass-fibre. We had great difficulties in cleaning the glass. I was at Bell Laboratories at that time when it started and we would never think that we could do it. But now, life travels hundreds of kilometres through a glass-fibre and the repeated stages and so. Or the satellite, they all relied on a essentially silicon technology in the very heart of these instruments. So the consumers can have very cheap telephone costs.

No problem for me to call my children who are in the States or friends in Germany. When but I went to the United States, making an overseas telephone call was already quite an investment. So this has all come down. Or even in the kitchen with much better control and safety and security fire alarm and so on. So this is what we silicon people did for you.

Wafer-fabrication is said to grow by 25% in the
next 2 years (QU: Yes!) and then Singapore for the next 10 years, we have been talking about twenty-five thousand new jobs. (QU: Right!) Now, what do you think it will take the countries to milk this
wafer-fab dry and keep pace with global markets?

You have to be aware of basically such: the Silicon age differs from the previous bronze and iron age in that it is based on Science. The Iron Age, when it started was just trial and error. You threw something into your iron and thought, maybe it makes it stronger or tougher so easier to mill and so on. But Silicon would not have been possible without really understanding the electronic and atomic features, understanding quantum theory and so on.

So if you are in this business, it's not enough to simply do development work or old-fashioned type of engineering. You have to follow the scientific trends like the quantum affects it and so on. So that is very important. So, you need at least the minimal of scientific observations so that you know what might be becoming, so you can plan ahead.

Now, you have been hailed as one of the forefathers of the Silicon Valley. (QU: Oh no.) Having started your silicon way back in the 1950s with Nobel laureate William Shockley, tell us what it was like, what the lesson was to learn working with such a man who has brilliant full sights, but
not very successful on the commercial side?

That is quite right! William Shockley invented the transistor and dial at Bell telephone laboratory together with 2 colleagues which received the Nobel Prize in fifty-six. Then he said somewhat gloriously and said, "I have seen my name often enough in the Physics Papers and now I want to see my name in Wall Street Journal". So and then he went to Northern California. This was an area, which he liked and there was nothing else going on. No competing industry.

So if you want to start a new technology, go to a new place very much like it happening in Venice centuries before and then Shockley hired a very good crew which that deserted him. It was almost a Greek tragedy, which was why Shockley was the Moses of Silicon Valley. He showed the Promised Land but he could not be there himself.

But his young people like the Intel people ended up now, and they made it and then they split and split and many, many new companies formed. And he bought the new materials, silicon to what is now called Silicon Valley- we didn't call it that time. We had no hope that it would ever get that name although we worked very hard, understanding this rather difficult material. He had invented a device, which could only be made with silicon for complicated technical reasons. Very complicated science. I worked on this aspect a lot and he was vain also.

This was one of his personality traits, the Shockley dial made by the Shockley Transistor Corporation and it was also a switch and when he set out in the mid-40s, in the Bell Lab. The idea was we have to find a better switch, we don't want to have this mechanical thing that do click click and want to do this electronically. He found it and he wanted to do his switch but the others might- Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore. We now can control this difficult material and let's make it Transistor. And the time was right, it was a Sputnik shot and there was a big upsurge in the technology. The race with the Russians space programme and so on.

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