Chip Industry: How US Succeeded & USSR flawed during cold war

 After 1945, there was arms race between the US and the USSR to prove their supremacy. Apart from this arms race, there was tight competition in science and technology between these nations. The USSR’s sputnik moment triggered American policy makers to announce that they were going to the moon, which they later achieved in 1969. Similarly, when the news of transistor invention by Shockley and IC invention by Jack Kilby/Noyce reached the USSR, their scientists/policymakers also wanted to emulate similar developments in modern electronics for their country.

Soviet scientists who were working in semiconductors in the 1960s were also not inferior to American scientists. Zhores Alferov (USSR Scientist), along with Jack Kilby, was awarded the Nobel Prize for his research related to IC invention. Soviet scientists produced an IC in 1962 after the yuri gagarin orbited the Earth. Soviet policymakers saw the success of Silicon Valley and wanted to build their own electronic city in the USSR. Nikita Khrushchev, the former premier of the Soviet Union, also approved a city that was planned to be a scientific paradise. The USSR named the city Zelenograd. Zelenograd and the surrounding infrastructure seemed to have begun the sunshine for the modern Soviet electronics industry. The Soviets, however, were unable to achieve success like Americans in semiconductors after decades.
There were two reasons attributed as per the book.

Copy Strategy

Even though the US and the USSR fought bitterly invisibly, there were few good things between them. A student exchange program was conducted between the two countries. Few bright Soviet students were studying in top-notch universities in the 1960s under the guidance of semiconductor inventors such as Shockley. The Texas Instruments SN51 chip was quite famous in the 60s. One Soviet bureaucrat Shokin asked a Soviet student and scientist named Malin to acquire the chip and smuggle it to the Soviet Union. When Malin arrived in the Soviet Union, he and other scientists were ordered to make a copy of a chip with 1:1 matching within three months. The scientists were shocked and angry with copy suggestion. They believed they were as advanced as American physicists and scientists.
The copy strategy worked well earlier for the Soviet Union when they built their first nuclear weapon. When Stalin found out about the Hiroshima bomb, he immediately asked his scientists to build a nuclear bomb as quickly as possible, throwing all the home-made designs they had worked for years. Stolen secret nuclear bombs provided by Klaus Fuchs (soviet spy who worked on the Manhattan project) successfully helped them to clone implosion based plutonium bombs within three years. American generals and bureaucrats believed that the Soviets wouldn’t be able to make nuclear bombs for 10 to 20 years. That belief destroyed in few years with aid of hardworking soviet scientists & shrewd decisions of soviet authoritarians.

Although Soviet scientists were forced to work on the copying process, they were not able to achieve the success that US companies like Texas instruments or Fairchild had achieved in a few years. The Soviet copy strategy for semiconductors was erroneous because the semiconductor manufacturing process was so complicated. Only a few engineers, like Andy Grove and Mary Anne Potter, could handle every step of the manufacturing process. Even if Soviet scientists were close to achieving success, they lacked mass production and reliability associated with it. The copying strategy could not produce any innovative chips due to Moore’s law. The cutting edge was enhanced within a few years due to Moore’s law. Texas Instruments and Fairchild went one step above Soviet chips every time they came close.

Civilian IC use and International Supply chain

The Soviets wanted to build a semiconductor industry mainly to help its military industry with precision and guidance. The U.S. used its semiconductor industry for civilian purposes as well for military purposes. Civilian chip demand has driven the US semiconductor industry to finance the necessary supply chain and create expertise in all areas of semiconductors field. The Soviet Union barely has a civilian consumer market, so it produced a fraction of chips like the US. Due to a lower number of chips produced, the Soviets faced heavy costs for capital investment and maintenance of semiconductor manufacturing units.

The U.S. also used its Cold War allies very effectively, boosting the international supply chain. In the 1980s, the US integrated its processor market along with Japan’s memory market, utilizing international labor. This made it a giant in the semiconductor and computing industries. The Soviet Union does not have all this.

Conclusion

The U.S. built its moon rocket with the Apollo guidance computer and sharpened its strategic “Minuteman” missile with high precision. These were the first fruits of US semiconductor success. The USSR had the same ambitions for rockets and missiles, a dream that never came true. Zelenograd has never achieved what it was created, but Silicon Valley has achieved remarkable success in the next few decades. The Persian Gulf War occurred in 1990. By that time, the USSR faded and became history. The New York Times headlined “WAR HERO Status possible for Chip,” indicating that the stellar success of the Persian Gulf War was fully attributable to computer chips.

Source: Chip wars

Wernher Von Braun, left, examines the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer used to guide the Saturn V rocket.