概念四Lesson10.pptVIP

Lesson 10 Silicon valley Silicon valley: a part of California in the area between San Francisco and San José, which is a centre of the computer industry. Many important inventions were made in this area, and many large and small companies producing computer software and hardware are based there. It is called Silicon Valley because the computer industry is based on the silicon chip. What does the computer industry thrive on apart from anarchy? Technology trends may push Silicon Valley back to the future． Carver Mead, a pioneer in integrated circuits and a professor of computer science at the California Institute of Technology, notes there are now workstations that enable engineers to design, test and produce chips right on their desks, much the way an editor creates a newsletter on a Macintosh． As the time and cost of making a chip drop to a few days and a few hundred dollars, engineers may soon be free to let their imaginations soar without being penalized by expensive failures． Mead predicts that inventors will be able to perfect powerful customized chips over a weekend at the office ----spawning a new generation of garage start-ups and giving the U．S．a jump on its foreign rivals in getting new products to market fast． Weve got more garages with smart people,’ Mead observes. ‘We really thrive on anarchy.’ And on Asians．Already, orientals and Asian Americans constitute the majority of the engineering staffs at many Valley firms． And Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Indian engineers are graduating in droves from California‘s colleges． As the heads of next-generation start-ups, these Asian innovators can draw on customs and languages to forge tighter links with crucial Pacific Rim markets． The Pacific Rim Countries: the countries around the Pacific Ocean, such as Japan, Australia, and the west coast of the US, considered as an economic group For instance, Alex Au, a Stanford Ph．D． from Hong Kong, has set up a Taiwan factory to ch