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Introduction
The cumbersomely named "silicon-gate MOS transistor" was, by 2007, quite probably the object most made by humans. In the three decades spanning the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s, these transistors served as the basic electronic components found on microchips. Scientists and engineers in the semiconductor industry packed exponentially larger numbers of these microscopic "on-off" switches onto microchips over this entire period. The best industry estimates hold that some 12.7 quintillion (1.27 x 1019) silicon- gate MOS transistors were produced on the microchips manufactured during 2007 alone.1 For a sense of scale, this is equivalent to the manufacture of around 2.4 billion silicon-gate MOS transistors for each person then living or, in less humanistic terms, a single silicon-gate MOS transistor for every living insect. In this remarkable abundance, the silicon-gate MOS transistors in microchips served as the primary building block of the digital world. While there are several excellent existing histories of semiconductor electronics and a handful of valuable studies that treat some localized elements of the development of silicon-gate MOS technology, the present study represents the first attempt to articulate, as a whole, how the technology emerged, was established, and came to dominate semiconductor electronics in the 1960s through the '70s.2 This study thus extends the existing literature, drawing on a wide variety of historical sources that the authors created, collected, and unearthed.
Methodologically, our account of silicon-gate MOS technology makes reference to three entwined contextual logics: material logic, market logic, and competitive logic. Elsewhere, the authors have used these same contextual logics to elucidate and explain earlier developments in semiconductor electronics: namely, the planar process and the silicon microchip.3 As a concept, material logic is strongly connected to the "material turn" taken recently by several historians and social scientists, including historians of technology and science and STS practitioners.4 Likewise, market logic and competitive logic are issues of intention and agency-central topics within the STS literature since the 1980s.5 Materiality and intentionality are the two fundamental concepts used by Andrew Pickering in his account of the mangle, the reciprocal structuring of human and material agency in the development of technology and science. As such, our use of material, mar- ket, and competitive logics to explicate the history of silicon-gate MOS technology is a contribution to...