While I can’t really call myself a big fan of Jay Leno, I confess to the occasional guilty pleasure of enjoying the "Jaywalking" segment in his "Tonight" show, when he would go out on the street and ask people he ran into questions like "Where was the Vietnam War fought?" Answer: "Korea?" Or "What is this a picture of?" (showing the zeppelin Hindenburg bursting into flames). Answer: "The sinking of the Titanic?" And one of my favorites, (showing a brand-new college graduate still in her robe and mortarboard a photo of President Lyndon Baines Johnson) "Who is this man? His initials are LBJ." Answer: "Jefferson?"



Jay Leno, the originator of "Jaywalking." Source: NBC.

        "The battery."

        "The MP3s."

(Showing them a SEM of a computer chip) What is this?

        "A map?"

        "A bacteria?" (At least this guy realized some sort of a microscope was involved.)

What’s inside a memory stick?

        "A tape recorder?"

        "A battery that’s charged by the data?"

What does a solar panel do?

        "It keeps your roof cool in the summer."

What is a semiconductor?

        "Something that doesn’t conduct very good?"

(OK now. Count to 10 and breathe slowly. Iiiin, out, iiiin out.)

To be fair, a few were able to give cogent—albeit not detailed—answers, but none of my interviewees recognized the names of some of Silicon Valley’s leading companies, much less had any idea of what they did. Applied Materials, KLA-Tencor, Novellus, Honeywell and others were dark riddles inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma, with one exception: Intel. Everyone I questioned at least heard the company’s name and gave answers ranging from, "Oh, yeah. ‘Intel Inside!’ Dee-dah dee-dah!" to "They make microprocessors."

Incidentally, I learned that Silicon Valley was named that either because "it’s where they mine silicon," or because "it’s got a lot of high-tech companies in it." When asked, if that was the case, why it shouldn’t have been named "Technology Valley" instead, there was no answer. When directly questioned about the mined silicon’s applications, most—with varying degrees of embarrassment or a knowing smile—referred to the best-known, uh, "esthetic" use for silicone. One of these was a genial old gentleman—a retired college professor—with a pacemaker, a device with considerable semiconductor (silicon) content.

Another of my neighbors took me to his backyard and proudly pointed to the newly installed solar array on his roof. And while he realized that it wasn’t there for the shade, and knew what it did (convert sunlight into electricity), he hadn’t the faintest idea of what the photovoltaic cells were made of, or whether they had any connection with semiconductor technology.

This was quite an experience for me. I came out of it with a series of very contradictory emotions churning within me: amusement, depression, disgust and, finally, anger.

It really comes down to this: We’re not doing our job to get the word out, folks. Not as an industry, not as technologists, not as journalists. Our industry organizations are as guilty—or perhaps even more so—than we are. After all, it is part of their charter to make the world aware of what it is we do, the benefits our work confers upon everyone. Is there, I wonder, any technology more all-encompassing than semiconductors? Unless one lives with Tarzan and Cheetah in some Edenic jungle that exists beyond maps, we all daily benefit from the literally thousands of interactions we have with semiconductors, whether it be in communications, entertainment, medicine, education, travel—you name it—where the fruits of our industry are present in various forms.

So how, in the name of all that’s holy can people be so unaware, so clueless about one of the most powerful, most important, principal mainstays of world civilization? How can we as an industry be so completely unable to communicate to the outside world what is the origin and invisible support of practically everything that enables us to have serious discussions about going back to the moon or traveling to Mars, instead of spending most of our waking hours scrambling in the mud looking for fat bugs to eat?

Yes, it is funny when a senator, after being given a tour of a leading nanotech center, lectures the press about the significance of a 450-milliliter wafer. But that same person sits in Washington and could be the one who casts the deciding vote on issues that can affect technology in general and the semiconductor industry in particular.

Getting our message out isn’t a battle we can leave to company CEOs when they travel to the nation’s capital to give testimony to one congressional committee or another, or to PR agencies and the media. It is a struggle in which we must all lend a hand—the line engineer, the tech, and yes, the journalists who track developments in our industry. The message is simply not getting out—the vast bulk of the world has no idea whatsoever of who we are, or what we do and contribute.

If, as the saying goes, "Ignorance is bliss," how come people aren’t dancing in the streets out of sheer joy?