O'Reagan Douglas, Fleming Lee
Technol Cult. 2018;59(2):251-288. doi: 10.1353/tech.2018.0029.
The "FinFET" design for transistors, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1990s, represented a major leap forward in the semiconductor industry. Understanding its origins and importance requires deep knowledge of local factors, such as the relationships among the lab's principal investigators, students, staff, and the institution. It also requires understanding this lab within the broader network of relationships that comprise the semiconductor industry-a much more difficult task using traditional historical methods, due to the paucity of sources on industrial research. This article is simultaneously 1) a history of an impactful technology and its social context, 2) an experiment in using data tools and visualizations as a complement to archival and oral history sources, to clarify and explore these "big picture" dimensions, and 3) an introduction to specific data visualization tools that we hope will be useful to historians of technology more generally.
20世纪90年代，加州大学伯克利分校研发的晶体管“鳍式场效应晶体管”（FinFET）设计代表了半导体行业的一次重大飞跃。要理解其起源和重要性，需要深入了解当地因素，比如实验室主要研究人员、学生、工作人员以及该机构之间的关系。这还需要在构成半导体行业的更广泛关系网络中理解这个实验室——由于工业研究资料匮乏，使用传统历史方法完成这项任务要困难得多。本文同时具备以下几点：1）一项关于一项有影响力的技术及其社会背景的历史研究；2）一项利用数据工具和可视化手段作为档案和口述历史资料的补充，以阐明和探索这些“宏观”维度的实验；3）对特定数据可视化工具的介绍，我们希望这些工具对更广泛的技术史学家有用。
