Health, Women's Work, and Industrialization - Center for Gender in ...

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Development of the Electronics Industry
The electronics industry is a large, diverse industry which is made up
of two major sectors: components and final products. The components -­
which are combined into final products -- can be further divided into
passive (e.g., capacitors, resistors) and active (e.g., semiconductors,
tubes) components. The final products can be further divided into consumer,
industrial/scientific, and military/aero-space.
The electronics industry has undergone a rapid technological change
whi ch is best characteri zed by the semi conductor industry. Preceded by
vacuum tubes since the 1920s, the semiconductor industry fully emerged with
the development of the transistor in the 1950s. And with the development of
the integrated ci rcuit (Ie) and the growi ng demand for computers in the
earl y 1960s, the semi conductor industry began to mushroom. Other 1 arge,
captive producers al so entered the competition. By the early 1970s there
were 96 U.S. compani es produci ng semiconductors. These ranged from
diversified corporations like Monsanto, to captive producers like Motorola,
to merchant IC houses like National Semiconductor.
Although the types of ICs are numerous, the producti on processes, all
following circuitry design, fall into the same basic flow: (l) mask-making,
(2) wafer fabrication, (3) assembly, and (4) testing (Oldham 1977). The
mask-making step is basically a photo-reduction process to reduce the size
of the ci rcuit desi gn. Wafer fabri cati on represents the most compl ex and
sensitive of the processes, when slices of silicon crystals are doped with
chemi cal impuriti es to create el ectroni cally conducti ve and non-conducti ve
areas on each chip, the circuit pattern then being etched into the wafers
with acids and solvents. In the assembly stage, the wafers are cut into
i ndi vi dual chi ps, whi ch are then attached to substrates (or headers) and
bonded under microscope to the appropriate points on the circuit. Finally,
the packaged devices are subjected to a series of temperature, leakage, and
electrical tests. The required workforce for the production of
semiconductors consists of a large number of talented scientists and
engineers and a large number of semi-skilled and unskilled production
workers (U.S. Department of Commerce 1979).
Because of rapid technological changes, the products of the
semiconductor industry have a very short product cycle (Chang 1971). With
constantly expandi ng vol ume and improved technology, the prices of these
products have also consistently and rapidly fallen after their initial
introduction to the market. These reasons, along with the phenomenal growth
in the number of manufacturers, cause the industry to be highly competitive
in all countries. Continuous research, development, and capital investment
in equipment are vital. Hence, the survival of any company essentially
depends on the ability to introduce new, superior products early and to keep
the variable costs of production -- the majority of which is labor -- very
low.
Because the process for production of semiconductors can be segmented
easily into the four steps, because the products are small and lightweight,