Ch. 8: Copy it (Chip War)

Nikita Khruschev’s support for building the Soviet microelectronics center, Zelenograd, coincided with the return of Soviet student Boris Malin from studying in Pennsylvania with an integrated circuit. Alexander Shokin, the bureaucrat in charge of Soviet microelectronics, ordered scientists to copy the integrated circuit one-for-one without deviation, without fully understanding the implications of this strategy. The Soviets had some of the world’s leading theoretical physicists and Jack Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize for inventing integrated circuits, but their production process lacked the sophistication and purity needed to mass-produce chips reliably. Spying could only get them so far, as specialized knowledge was often not written down or shared outside company walls.

The cutting edge of semiconductor technology was constantly changing, as per Moore’s Law, with TI and Fairchild introducing new designs with more transistors every year, making the earliest integrated circuits obsolete. The size of transistors and their energy consumption were shrinking while computing power packed in a square inch of silicon doubled roughly every two years. The Soviet leaders failed to understand that copying old designs condemned them to backwardness, with their chipmaking machinery even using inches instead of centimeters for better replication from American models. This “copy it” strategy meant that they started several years behind the US, never catching up due to a lack of creativity and market exploration, with civilian products being an afterthought amid military production focus.

Zelenograd became a poorly run outpost in the Silicon Valley, with pathways for innovation set by the US, with American chipmakers at its center. The Soviet microelectronics center was unable to keep up with the rapid pace of change in the semiconductor industry, and the lack of market exploration and creativity doomed it to failure. The US remained at the forefront of the semiconductor industry, leading the world in chip design and production, while Zelenograd remained a footnote in the history of the integrated circuit.

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