ABSTRACT
Without semi-conductors, the modern communications industry would not exist. Every mobile terminal, every radio base station, every network switch, every computer that forms the basis of the Internet comprises several thousand semi-conductors, all working together in unison to store, analyse and retrieve the miniscule electrical pulses that form the basis of the “information age” (Moore, 1996). Without semi-conductors, users wishing to make a phone call would still be relying on electro-mechanical switches. Phone networks as a result would have an extremely limited capacity both in terms of the numbers of subscribers an operator could support and services would be limited to voice alone. Phones would be luxury items and very heavy, as they were in the early part of the twentieth century, limited in their impact on economic development and unlikely to have made it much beyond the wealthier economies. To speak of any kind of mobile telecommunications industry without mentioning the advances made in electronics from the 1970s onwards would also be impossible; semi-conductors enabled the creation of switches in mobile networks that could handle the fact that a user was moving from one place to another (Meurling and Jeans, 2000). This is a fundamental part of the communications industrial subsystem, acting as the conductor for the communications industries symphony – a demanding taskmaster that the rest of the industries must keep up with. “Each year, integrated circuits and other electronic components become better, faster, cheaper, providing opportunities to improve existing computers as well as to design new kinds” (Bresnahan and Greenstein, 1997).
