Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 1/16/2023
Asianometry has an interesting video up about East Germany expensive, strenuous efforts to catch up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing technology.
Spoiler: They didn’t.
Some takeaways:
• “In the late 1980s, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, went all in on the monumental task of domestic semiconductor production. This semiconductor obsession failed, and the billions of marks spent on it eventually bankrupted the country’s failing economy.” I think he oversells the role the semiconductor push had on bankrupting the economy; everything in late commie East Germany was failing (just like the rest of the Warsaw Pact), they suffered a credit crunch for investment due to tightened western restrictions, couldn’t export Soviet oil as profitably due to the Reagan/Saudi created oil glut, and also were running into hard currency shortages to but the components their manufacturing sector needed to keep exporting.
• The East German Uprising of 1953 kicked off what would be a persistent, and ultimately existential problem, for the GDR: Emigration. Throughout its history, its best and smartest people consistently sought a way out to the West. To convince its people to stay, the SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, AKA Socialist Unity Party of Germany] promised a better future through the use of technology. More than the Soviets, East Germany leaned on information technology as a pathway towards economic vitality and a glorious socialist future. The Party’s elites saw themselves locked in a technology race with the capitalists to see who can build a better society. Leader Walter Ulbricht called for an “industrial transformation” with the ultimate aim of “catching up with and surpassing capitalism in terms of technology.” A thriving computer industry was crucial towards making this ideology work. And in order to produce these superior computers, East Germany needed to learn and master microelectronics technology.
• “Less than four years after the Americans invented the germanium transistor, East Germany moved quickly to build their own line of first generation semiconductors. In 1952, development work began at the VEB Works for Electrical Components for Communications Technology, or WBN, in the town of Teltow near the city of Berlin. This put them about even with West Germany. The FRG’s first semiconductor factory came about in 1952, built by Siemens.” Indeed, this is very early to get into the semiconductor game. It wasn’t until 1957 that Fairchild Semiconductor, widely considered as Company Zero for America’s semiconductor industry, was founded.
• “WBN suffered from a lack of cooperation between its industrial and academic sides. The production teams lacked discipline, hands-on experience, and did not appreciate the scale and difficulty of the task they were facing. In one incident, the team dumped hot ashes right outside a factory window where they were producing a pilot run of semiconductors.” Ouch! A very uncleanroom…
• “The state failed to give their young semiconductor team the resources it should have gotten. Administration – their chief accountant, in particular – seemed to care very little for semiconductors. When the team asked for money to purchase felt slippers to prevent static charge buildup in the clean room, their chief accountant denied the request.”
• The Soviets didn’t help. “Despite being the GDR’s primary political backer, the Soviets were strangely wary. In 1958, two WBN staff members traveled to the Soviet Union to do technical exchanges. A year later, they came back complaining of limited cooperation. Much of what the Soviets had developed was created for military use. Thusly, the Soviets were concerned that transferring that to the East Germans would leak via scientists defecting to the West.”
• They tried to get information from the U.S., but Cold War tech transfer policies were already falling into place. They had better luck in the UK. “Through the contacts of Arthur Lewis, a British Labour Party politician, the delegation saw plants owned by British Philips, Siemens-Edison, and British-Thompson-Houston. The latter is a descendant of the Vickers Company that sold oil equipment to the Soviets in the early 1900s. Just thought that was a nice connection. This visit was very successful. The East Germans learned a whole lot about industrial level semiconductor manufacturing. They even managed to purchase equipment for low-frequency transistors, a trailing edge technology.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s&t=1sMore:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=53844
