经济学人双语精读TE-2023-05-01期考研英语杂志英文外刊|万物皆有芯(PDF版+Word版+音频)
Chips in everything
Gordon Moore, formulator of the law that drove the digital revolution, died on March 24th, aged 94
【1】MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHERS once wondered how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Gordon Moore, who with his linking for pad, pencil, and a quiet, solitary desk often looked philosophical, wondered how many transistors could be etched on one silicon wafer to make an integrated circuit. The first transistors he had ever encountered, in 1954 at a lecture by the man who had co-invented them, William Shockley, were as big as peanuts. But they were shrinking fast. The more you could pack together, the more these tiny marvels could do, until they could probably change the world.
【2】In 1965, in Electronics magazine, he laid out his thinking plainly. In the past decade, the number of components in each integrated circuit had roughly doubled every year. In the next decade, therefore, they would probably do the same. Devices containing such circuits would become more efficient, more popular, and less expensive, all at an exponential rate. They would power "such wonders" as home computers, automatic controls for cars, and "personal portable communications equipment", Even wristwatches could have them. And though he went no further into his crystal ball than 1975, he saw no reason why this extraordinary growth should not go on for a long, long time.
【3】The article caused a sensation. What seemed to him just blind extrapolation was seized on as a Great Truth, "Moore"s law". From that time on, semiconductor companies took it as a given that the processing power of their product ought to double every year. If it didn"t, they would lose their edge. In 1975 Dr. Moore reviewed it and thought the rate of doubling should be every two years even though, in the preceding decade, it had in fact doubled in nine of the ten years. This refinement hardly made a difference. The points the industry took away from him were, first, to make semiconductors as tiny as possible, and second, to do it fast. Or fall behind, probably never to recover.
【4】He was surprised to have given his name to any law, and more so to be called a revolutionary. The silicon revolution was a fact, but he himself was a rooted, reversed sort of fellow who had hardly ever lived outside the foggy country south of San Franciso, and whose greatest love, beyond his work and his wife, was fishing. The closest he had come to revolution was when, as a boy, he made explosives with a home chemistry set, and somewhere in his well-stuffed bookshelves he still had his acid-scorched primer on the nature of nitroglycerine. But when it came to forging the digital age he was simply, he thought, in the right place at the right time. He got into semiconductors at the very start, and that was a great piece of luck.
【5】He also drove the transformation, though, and not just with his law. At Shockley Laboratories, where he went in 1965, his job was fundamental: to create a cheap transistor based on silicon, of which the world had plenty. At Fairchild semiconductor, founded by "the traitorous eight" who broke from Shockley in 1957, he developed a smooth silicon-dioxide surface on which to print the electric circuits and pioneered the use of aluminum wiresto connect the transistors. When he founded Inter with Robert Noyce in 1968 he worked on self-isolating transistors, which could be packed more closely, as well as devising a better dip to clean the silicon surface before the aluminum went on. The single change increased chip production more than tenfold.
【6】He called himself an accidental entrepreneur, but there were not many accidents about it. He left Shockley mostly because the man had no interest in getting the product to market. At Fairchild, in which each founder had invested $500, they were making chips commercially in less than a year and had overtaken both Texas Instruments and Bell Labs in military applications. But Fairchild became too slow for him. His business plan for Intel, Vague as it looked to make interesting things with silicon-was spurred by his burning belief in chips in everything. By the 1990s, Intel microprocessors were in 80% of all the computers made in the world.
【7】Moore"s law stated that as microchips invaded appliances, sales would soar and prices would fall, but set up to make them was costly. He, therefore, strived to save money. He fitted out Fairchild"s first premises with cheap kitchen units and blew his own glass tubes to manipulate gases, as he had done for Shockley. At Intel he watched every cent, down to rubber gloves which he found for $1 a pair, rather than $2.50. This was habit. Unit 1961 he had kept a ledger of all household incoming and outgoings, including a nickel found in his wife Betty"s pocket and a dime spent on a pencil "red". After 1961, he no longer needed to; his monthly salary, as charted in the ledger, was rising as steeply as the number of transistors on each chip. By 2014 his net worth was $7bn.
【8】Typically, though, his wealth did not change him. He liked to wear well-worn khakis and go out in his rickety old fishing boat until it became unsafe. He liked things as they were. When he became rich he and Betty gave more than half of it away. They were motivated by seeing their fishinghaunts in Baja California smothered by development, and their precious wild places disappearing. He did not think small. His foundation"s grants went not just to Caltech and the Bay Area but were also earmarked to save two-thirds of the Amazon basin and the whole arc of salmon rivers that curved from northern California, through Alaska, to Russia"s east.
【9】He hoped that might be his permanent legacy. Instead his legacy, inevitably, was Moore"s law, which could not last forever. He had never said it would; exponential growth always burned itself out. By 2020 its end was predicted within a decade in America. The Taiwanese were doing well but, even so,transistors could not endlessly be made smaller. In 2021 one was achieved that measured no more than a nanometre, a billionth of a meter, almost the size of an atom. Already billions of transistors could be squeezed into one silicon chip. Naturally, he accepted the laws of physics. As a chemist, though, he could not help hoping that some new material, some new process, might yet make room for more.
1、短语
1)原文:In 1965, in Electronics magazine, he laid out his thinking plainly.
词典:lay out 展示,提出
例句:I"d like to lay out my reasoning.
我想陈述一下我的理由。
2)原文:The article caused a sensation. What seemed to him just blind extrapolation was seized on as a Great Truth, "Moore"s law".
词典:seize on 抓住
例句:We"ll seize on this chance.
我们要抓住这个机会。
3)原文:When he founded Inter with Robert Noyce in 1968 he worked on self-isolating transistors, which could be packed more closely, as well as devising a better dip to clean the silicon surface before the aluminum went on..
词典:work on 从事、致力于
例句:I need to work on my swing.
我需要改进我的挥杆动作。
4)原文:He, therefore, strived to save money..
词典:strive to 努力
例句:Newspaper editors all strive to be first with a story.
报纸编辑都力争率先报道。
2、长难句
1、
1)原文:
The first transistors he had ever encountered, in 1954 at a lecture by the man who had co-invented them, William Shockley, were as big as peanuts.
2)分析:
l 红色部分是主句,是主系表结构。绿色部分是定语从句,修饰先行词first transistors。蓝色部分是时间状语和地点状语。
l 紫色部分是介词短语做后置定语,修饰lecture。橙色部分是who引导的定语从句,修饰the man。棕色部分是同位语。
3)译文:1954年,他在威廉·肖克(William Shockley)——晶体管发明者之一——的讲座上,第一次接触到了晶体管,当时晶体管和花生一样大。
2、
1)原文:The silicon revolution was a fact, but he himself was a rooted, reversed sort of fellow who had hardly ever lived outside the foggy country south of San Franciso, and whose greatest love, beyond his work and his wife, was fishing.
2) 分析:
l 红色部分是主句,有两个分句组成。蓝色部分分别是who和whose引导的两个定语从句,均修饰先行词fellow。
l 绿色部分是后置定语,修饰country。紫色部分是插入语,起到补充说明的作用,对love进行进一步修饰。
3)译文:硅谷革命是事实,但摩尔本人却是一个扎根家乡、为人低调的人,他几乎从没有离开过那个位于旧金山南部的多雾的农村。除了工作和陪妻子之外,他最大的爱好就是钓鱼。
3、写作技巧
1)原文:
His business plan for Intel, vague as it looked to make interesting things with silicon-was spurred by his burning belief in chips in everything.
他为英特尔公司制定的商业计划,即用硅造些有趣的东西,尽管看起来并不清晰,却是出自他的坚定信念——万物皆可有芯。
2)技巧分析:
例句中出现了as引导让步状语从句的用法:
l Much as l like you, l couldn’t live with you.我尽管很喜欢你,却不能和你在一起生活。
此外,as还可以引导其他状语从句。
l 时间状语从句:As time goes on, he will understand what l said.随着时间的推移,他会理解我所讲的话。
l 定语从句:l never heard such stories as he told.我从未听过他所讲的那样的故事。
l 原因状语从句:As the weather is so bad, we have to delay our journey.因为天气太糟糕,我们不得不推迟旅行。
l 方式状语从句:Do as the Romans do when in Rome.入乡随俗。
4、背景分析
2023年3月24日,根据英特尔公司官网和“戈登与贝蒂·摩尔基金会”宣布,公司联合创始人戈登·摩尔去世,享年94岁。
1929年,摩尔出生在旧金山南部的沿海小镇。11岁时,他和父母一起去邻居家做客时,无意中看到的一套化学实验设备,这成了打开摩尔科学之门的钥匙。
为了圆自己的科学梦想,他通过刻苦学习顺利考入了加州大学伯克利分校学习化学,并于1950年取得了化学学位,后来又在加州理工学院获得了物理化学博士学位。而这一切经历都成为了摩尔今后在半导体行业一展身手的财富。在此之后,摩尔深入到半导体行业不断实践,并对这一领域的发展趋势有了深刻的认知。颇具化学与物理天赋的他,以敏锐的行业眼光,对产业的发展进行了大胆预测,并在1965年4月19日,在《电子》杂志上发表了相关文章,提出了“摩尔定律”。
2005年,摩尔在接受采访时曾说:“我很幸运参与了半导体行业的起步阶段,有机会同行业一起成长。我们经历了从不能制造单个硅晶体管,到把17亿硅晶体管放在一块芯片上的时代,这是一次非凡的旅程。”
段落大意:
【1】戈登·摩尔思考能在一个硅片上蚀刻多少晶体管来制成一个集成电路,他开创了晶体管的新时代。
【2】1965年,他清楚地阐述了自己的想法。即每个集成电路上面的元件数量会每年翻一番。
【3】这篇文章引起轰动,摩尔的这一推测也被称为”摩尔定律“。
【4】摩尔是一个非常朴实低调的人,他从没想过自己的名字会和一个定律联系起来。
【6】他称自己成为企业家只是偶然,但取得成功却不是,他坚信芯片可以用在万事万物上。
【7】摩尔用各种方式努力节省成本,后来其月薪飞速升高,到了2014年,他的净资产已经达到了70亿美元。
【8】摩尔和妻子致力于慈善事业。
【9】摩尔定律或许会失效,但摩尔依旧希望能出现一些新材料、新工艺,创造新的突破。
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