Semiconductor chips don’t carry the secrets of their manufacture. Let’s say a modern chip fell into 1958. They had electron microscopes, so they could see there were tiny structures there. And they had analytical chemistry for macroscopic samples, so they’d be able to tell the chip was almost pure silicon, with small admixtures of the sort of impurities that form transistors. But they didn’t have ion milling and scanning microprobes, so they wouldn’t be able to tell how the impurities were arranged into devices. And they certainly wouldn’t know how to reproduce the highly developed engineering that manufactures these chips nowadays.
So the best they could do would be to start the development of ever-smaller semiconductors, knowing that someday they would be very impressive. And until then, they would do good stuff along the way. Which is pretty much what happened in real life.
Epistemic status: I designed chips from 1982 to 1994. I never saw an alien spaceship.
Semiconductor chips don’t carry the secrets of their manufacture. Let’s say a modern chip fell into 1958. They had electron microscopes, so they could see there were tiny structures there. And they had analytical chemistry for macroscopic samples, so they’d be able to tell the chip was almost pure silicon, with small admixtures of the sort of impurities that form transistors. But they didn’t have ion milling and scanning microprobes, so they wouldn’t be able to tell how the impurities were arranged into devices. And they certainly wouldn’t know how to reproduce the highly developed engineering that manufactures these chips nowadays.
So the best they could do would be to start the development of ever-smaller semiconductors, knowing that someday they would be very impressive. And until then, they would do good stuff along the way. Which is pretty much what happened in real life.
Epistemic status: I designed chips from 1982 to 1994. I never saw an alien spaceship.