Промышленность США 150

Why the CCD Is the Most Important Spy Chip You've Never Heard Of It was invented in about an hour, at a blackboard, by two men at Bell Labs who were trying to do something else entirely. The problem in front of them in the autumn of 1969 was memory — a way to move charge along a chain of capacitors on a chip, as a competitor to the magnetic storage the industry was betting on. It failed as memory. What nobody in the room fully registered that afternoon was that a device which shuffles packets of charge from one well to the next does not care where the charge came from, and that light falling on silicon makes charge. Seven years later, the United States launched a satellite that did not carry film. Everything before it had. For fifteen years the way America photographed the Soviet Union was to expose film in orbit, wind it into a capsule, drop the capsule through the atmosphere, and catch it in mid-air with an aircraft trailing a hook. The pictures were superb and they were old by the time anyone saw them — days old, sometimes weeks. The new satellite had a chip at the focus of its telescope instead, and the image came down as a radio signal through a relay in higher orbit. The delay went from days to roughly the time it takes to read this paragraph, and it changed what intelligence was for. That satellite’s successors are still flying. The chip that made it possible went on to photograph the planets, find the first planets outside this solar system, and sit in the back of every camera sold for twenty years — and then it lost, decisively, to something cheaper that a different laboratory built in the 1990s. Two of the three men most responsible received the Nobel Prize in 2009. The third, the one who actually made it see, did not.