It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the modern tech industry simply couldn’t exist without semiconductors. Early electronics engineers needed a way to switch between two different circuits as well as amplify incoming signals. They ended up using a series of incandescent bottles known as vacuum tubes to tackle both of these chores.
Unfortunately, vacuum tubes get extremely hot during use and they eventually burn out. Telephony researchers desperately needed a better way to handle incoming calls since damaged tubes could very easily lead to service interruptions. In many ways, the modern tech industry was born the moment these technologists came up with semiconductor-driven transistors that didn’t rely on heated filaments.
By pushing two gold contacts into a sample of a metalloid element, these telephone pioneers found they were able to create circuit paths that didn’t need any hollow state components to function. Some of the earliest devices needed to be submerged in order to function, but transistors quickly took on the familiar shape they do today. Startup companies sprung up all over the world, and many of these made transistorized radios and television tuners that made it possible for smartphones to eventually come on the market.
Chances are good that a majority of modern semiconductor packages actually ship in the form of integrated circuits. Often called chips, these compressed devices contain a large number of electrical components built into them. Technologists can package an entire piece of equipment into a single chip this way, which then gives designers free choice on how to use it.
Everything from shortwave receivers to entire personal computers are available as single semiconductor boards these days. New agile companies can order a large number of parts off the shelf. That gives the managers of these firms the freedom to fashion complex consumer devices they wouldn’t otherwise be able to without a significant investment in research and development.
Perhaps the most interesting application driving new innovation today is in the field of embedded systems development. For some time, there was a trend of embedding high-level programming languages like C and Java into the firmware of dedicated semiconductor chips that allowed small devices to run software they’d otherwise get slowed down by. Digital televisions have long used this technology to execute compartmentalized software routines known as Xlets.
More recent developments include dedicated chips that can run artificial intelligence-based large language models without the need to rely on a distant cloud server. Considering that the need to access an outside machine limits the functionality of LLM software, it’s likely that an increasingly large number of tech companies are likely to invest in this kind of technology. Graphics processing units have long been repurposed to do this sort of work, but they have their limitations because they’re largely designed for performing sophisticated number-crunching operations on floating point variables.
New technologies that focus exclusively on text processing will probably start to grab an increasingly large percentage of market share in the next few years. At the same time, new innovations few people currently predict are likely to hit the shelves too.