Sand to Silicon by Shivanand Kanavi, Internet Edition-2

OF CHIPS AND WAFERS

“The complexity [of integrated circuits] for minimum costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.”

— GORDON E MOORE,
Electronics, VOL 38, NO 8, 1965


Where Silicon and Carbon atoms will
Link valencies, four figured, hand in hand
With common Ions and Rare Earths to fill
The lattices of Matter, Glass or Sand,
With tiny Excitations, quantitatively grand

— FROM “The Dance of the Solids”, BY JOHN UPDIKE
(Midpoint and Other Poems, ALFRED A KNOPF, 1969)

Several technologies and theories have converged to make modern Information Technology possible. Nevertheless, if we were to choose one that has laid the ground for revolutionary changes in this field, then it has to be semiconductors and microelectronics. Complex electronic circuits made of several components integrated on a single tiny chip of silicon are called Integrated Circuits or chips. They are products of modern microelectronics.


Chips have led to high-speed but inexpensive electronics. They have broken the speed, size and cost barriers and made electronics available to millions of people. This has created discontinuities in our lives—in the way we communicate, compute and transact.


The chip industry has created an unprecedented disruptive technology that has led to falling prices and increasing functionality at a furious pace.

DECONSTRUCTING MOORE’S LAW

Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, made a prediction in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip and the raw computing power of microchips would double every year while the cost of production would remain the same. When he made this prediction, chips had only 50 transistors; today, a chip can have more than 250 million transistors. Thus, the power of the chip has increased by a factor of five million in about thirty-eight years. The only correction to Moore’s Law is that nowadays the doubling is occurring every eighteen months, instead of a year.


As for cost, when transistors were commercialised in the early 1950s, one of them used to be sold for $49.95; today a chip like Pentium-4, which has 55 million transistors, costs about $200. In other words, the cost per transistor has dropped by a factor of ten million.


This is what has made chips affordable for all kinds of applications: personal computers that can do millions of arithmetic sums in a second, telecom networks that carry billions of calls, and Internet routers that serve up terabytes of data (tera is a thousand billion). The reduced costs allow chips to be used in a wide range of modern products. They control cars, microwave ovens, washing machines, cell phones, TVs, machine tools, wrist-watches, radios, audio systems and even toys. The Government of India is toying with the idea of providing all Indians with a chip-embedded identity card carrying all personal data needed for public purposes.


According to the Semiconductor Industry Association of the US, the industry is producing 100 million transistors per year for every person on earth (6 billion inhabitants), and this figure will reach a billion transistors per person by 2008!


The semiconductor industry is estimated to be a $300 billion-a-year business. Electronics, a technology that was born at the beginning of the twentieth century, has today been integrated into everything imaginable. The Nobel Committee paid the highest tribute to this phenomenal innovation in the year 2000 when it awarded the Nobel Prize in physics to Jack Kilby, who invented the integrated circuit, or the chip, at Texas Instruments in 1958.


Considering the breathtaking advances in the power of chips and the equally astonishing reduction in their cost, people sometimes wonder whether this trend will continue forever. Or will the growth come to an end soon?


The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or (IEEE as ‘I-triple E’)—the world’s most prestigious and largest professional association of electrical, electronics and computer engineers, conducted a survey among 565 of its distinguished fellows, all highly respected technologists. One of the questions the experts were asked was: how long will the semiconductor industry see exponential growth, or follow Moore’s Law? The results of the survey, published in the January 2003 issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine, saw the respondents deeply divided. An optimistic seventeen per cent said more than ten years, a majority—fifty two per cent—said five to ten years and a pessimistic thirty per cent said less than five years. So much for a ‘law’!


Well, then, what has fuelled the electronics revolution? The answer lies in the developments that have taken place in semiconductor physics and microelectronics. Let us take a quick tour of the main ideas involved in them.

ALL ABOUT SEMICONDUCTORS

What are semiconductors? A wit remarked, “They are bus conductors who take your money and do not issue tickets.” Jokes apart, they are materials that exhibit strange electrical properties. Normally, one comes across metals like copper and aluminium, which are good conductors, and rubber and wood, which are insulators, which do not conduct electricity. Semiconductors lie between these two categories.


What makes semiconductors unique is their behaviour when heated. All metals conduct well when they are cold, but their conductivity decreases when they become hot. Semiconductors do the exact opposite: they become insulators when they are cold and mild conductors when they are hot. So what’s the big deal? Well, classical nineteenth century physics, with its theory of how materials conduct or insulate the flow of electrons—tiny, negatively charged particles—could not explain this abnormal behaviour. As the new quantum theory of matter evolved in 1925-30, it became clear why semiconductors behave the way they do.


Quantum theory explained that, in a solid, electrons could have energies in two broad ranges: the valence band and the conduction band. The latter is at a higher level and separated from valence band by a gap in energy known as the band gap. Electrons in the valence band are bound to the positive part of matter and the ones in the conduction band are almost free to move around. For example, in metals, while some electrons are bound, many are free. So metals are good conductors.


According to atomic physics, heat is nothing but energy dissipated in the form of the random jiggling of atoms. At lower temperatures, the atoms are relatively quiet, while at higher temperatures they jiggle like mad. However, this jiggling slows down the motion of electrons through the material since they get scattered by jiggling atoms. It is similar to a situation where you are trying to get through a crowded hall. If the people in the crowd are restive and randomly moving then it takes longer for you to move across than when they are still. That is the reason metals conduct well when they are cold and conduct less as they become hotter and the jiggling of the atoms increases.


In the case of semiconductors, there are no free electrons at normal temperatures, since they are all sunk into the valence band, but, as the temperature increases, the electrons pick up energy from the jiggling atoms and get kicked across the band gap into the conduction band. This new-found freedom of a few electrons makes the semiconductors mild conductors at higher temperatures. To increase or decrease this band gap, to shape it across the length of the material the way you want, is at the heart of semiconductor technology.


Germanium, an element discovered by German scientists and named after their fatherland, is a semiconductor. It was studied extensively. When the UK and the US were working on a radar project during the Second World War, they heavily funded semiconductor research to build new electronic devices. Ironically, the material that came to their assistance in building the radar and defeating Germany was germanium.

MISCHIEF OF THE MISFITS

Now, what if small amounts of impurities are introduced into semiconductors? Common sense says this should lead to small changes in their properties. But, at the atomic level, reality often defies commonsense. Robert Pohl, who pioneered experimental research into semiconductors, noticed in the 1930s that the properties of semiconductors change drastically if small amounts of impurities are added to the crystal. This was the outstanding feature of these experiments and what Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli called ‘dirt physics’. Terrible as that sounds, the discovery of this phenomenon later led to wonderful devices like diodes and transistors. The ‘dirty’ semiconductors hit pay dirt.


Today, the processes of preparing a semiconductor crystal are advanced and the exact amount of a particular impurity to be added to it is carefully controlled in parts per million. The process of adding these impurities is called ‘doping’.


If we experiment with silicon, which has four valence electrons, and dope it with minuscule amounts (of the order of one part in a million) of phosphorus, arsenic or antimony, boron, aluminium, gallium or indium, we will see the conductivity of silicon improve dramatically.


How does doping change the behaviour of semiconductors drastically? We can call it the mischief of the misfits.

Misfits, in any ordered organisation, are avoided or looked upon with deep suspicion. But there are two kinds of misfits: those that corrupt and disorient the environment are called ‘bad apples’; those that stand above the mediocrity around them, and might even uplift the environment by seeding it with change for the better, are called change agents. The proper doping of pure, well-ordered semiconductor crystals of silicon and germanium leads to dramatic and positive changes in their electrical behaviour. These ‘dopants’ are change agents.


How do dopants work? Atomic physics has an explanation. Phosphorus, arsenic and antimony all have five electrons in the highest energy levels. When these elements are introduced as impurities in a silicon crystal and occupy the place of a small number of silicon atoms in a crystal, the crystal structure does not change much. But, since the surrounding silicon atoms have four electrons each, the extra electron in each dopant, which is relatively unattached, gets easily excited into the conduction band at room temperature. Such doped semiconductors are called N-type (negative type) semiconductors. The doping materials are called ‘donors’.


On the other hand, when we use boron, aluminium, gallium or indium as dopants, they leave a gap, or a ‘hole’, in the electronic borrowing and lending mechanisms of neighbouring atoms in the crystal, because they have three valence electrons. These holes, or deficiency of electrons, act like positively charged particles. Such semiconductors are described as Ptype (positive type). The dopants in this case are called ‘acceptors’.

VALVES, TRANSISTORS, et al

In the first four decades of the twentieth century, electronics was symbolized by valves. Vacuum tubes, or valves, which looked like dim incandescent light bulbs, brought tremendous change in technology and made radio and TV possible. They were the heart of both the transmission stations and the receiving sets at home, but they suffered from some big drawbacks: they consumed a lot of power, took time to warm up and, like ordinary light bulbs, burnt out often and unpredictably. Thus, electronics faced stagnation.


The times were crying for a small, low-power, low-cost, reliable replacement for vacuum tubes or valves. The need became all the more urgent with the development of radar during the Second World War.


Radars led to the development of microwave engineering. A vacuum tube called the magnetron was developed to produce microwaves. What was lacking was an efficient detector of the waves reflected by enemy aircraft. If enemy aircraft could be detected as they approached a country or a city, then precautionary measures like evacuation could minimise the damage to human life and warn the anti-aircraft guns to be ready. Though it was a defensive system, the side that possessed radars suffered the least when airpower was equal, and hence it had the potential to win the war. This paved the way for investments in semiconductor research, which led to the development of semiconductor diodes.


It is estimated that more money was spent on developing the radar than the Manhattan Project that created the atom bomb. Winston Churchill attributed the allied victory in the air war substantially to the development of radar.


Actually, electronics hobbyists knew semiconductor diodes long ago. Perhaps people in their middle age still remember their teenage days when crystal radios were a rage. Crystals of galena (lead sulphide), with metal wires pressed into them and called ‘cat’s whiskers’, were used to build inexpensive radio sets. It was a semiconductor device. The crystal diode converted the incoming undulating AC radio waves into a unidirectional DC current, a process known as ‘rectification’. The output of the crystal was then fed into an earphone.


A rectifier or a diode is like a one-way valve used by plumbers, which allows water to flow in one direction but prevents it from flowing back.


Interestingly, Indian scientist Jagdish Chandra Bose, who experimented with electromagnetic waves during the 1890s in Kolkata, created a semiconductor microwave detector, which he called the ‘coherer’. It is believed that Bose’s coherer, made of an iron-mercury compound, was the first solid-state device to be used. He demonstrated it to the Royal Institution in London in 1897. Guglielmo Marconi used a version of the coherer in his first wireless radio in 1897.


Bose also demonstrated the use of galena crystals for building receivers for short wavelength radio waves and for white and ultraviolet light. He received patent rights, in 1904, for their use in detecting electromagnetic radiation. Neville Mott, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his contributions to solid-state electronics, remarked, “J.C. Bose was at least 60 years ahead of his time” and “In fact, he had anticipated the existence of P-type and N-type semiconductors.”


Semiconductor diodes were a good beginning, but what was actually needed was a device that could amplify signals. A ‘triode valve’ could do this but had all the drawbacks of valve technology, which we referred to earlier. The question was: could the semiconductor equivalent of a triode be built?


For a telephone company, a reliable, inexpensive and low-power consuming amplifier was crucial for building a long-distance communications network, since long-distance communications are not possible without periodic amplification of signals. This led to AT&T, which had an excellent research and development laboratory named after Graham Bell, called Bell Labs, in New Jersey, starting a well-directed effort to invent a semiconductor amplifier.


William Shockley headed the Bell Labs research team. The team consisted, among others, of John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The duo built an amplifier using a tiny germanium crystal. Announcing the breakthrough to a yawning bunch of journalists on 30 June 1948, Bell
Labs’ Ralph Bown said: “We have called it the transistor because it is a resistor or semiconductor device which can amplify electrical signals as they are transferred through it.”


The press hardly took note. A sympathetic journalist wrote that the transistor might have some applications in making hearing aids! With apologies to T S Eliot, thus began the age of solid-state electronics—“not with a bang, but a whimper”.


The original transistor had manufacturing problems. Besides, nobody really understood how it worked. It was put together by tapping two wires into a block of germanium. Only some technicians had the magic touch that made it work. Shockley ironed out the problems by creating the junction transistor in 1950, using junctions of N-type and P-type semiconductors.

SAND CASTLES OF A DIFFERENT KIND

The early transistors, which were germanium devices, had a problem. Though germanium was easy to purify and deal with, devices made from it had a narrow temperature range of operation. Thus, if they heated up beyond sixty-seventy degrees centigrade, they behaved erratically. So the US military encouraged research into materials that would be more robust in battlefield conditions (rather than laboratories and homes).


A natural choice was silicon. It did not have some of the good properties of germanium. It was not easy to prepare pure silicon crystals, but silicon could deliver good results over a wide range of temperatures, up to 200 degrees centigrade. Moreover, it was easily available. Silicon is the second most abundant element on earth, constituting twenty-seven per cent of the earth’s crust. Ordinary sand is an oxide of silicon.


In 1954, Texas Instruments commercialised the silicon transistor and tried marketing a portable radio made from it. It was not so successful, but a fledgling company in post-war Japan, called Sony, was. Portable radios became very popular and, for many years and for most people, the word transistor became synonymous with an inexpensive portable radio.


What makes a transistor such a marvel? To understand a junction transistor, imagine a smooth road with a speed breaker. Varying the height of the speed breaker controls the traffic flow. However the effect of the change in the height of the ‘potential barrier’ in the transistor’s sandwiched region, which acts like a quantum speed breaker on the current, is exponential. That is, halving the height of the barrier or doubling it does not halve or double the current. Instead, it cuts it down to a seventh of its value or increases it seven times, thereby providing the ground for the amplification effect. After all, what is amplification but a small change getting converted to a large change? Thus, a small electrical signal can be applied to the ‘base’ of the transistor to lead to large changes in the current between the ‘emitter’ and the ‘collector’.

FRETTING OVER FETS

Then came the ‘FET’. The idea was to take a piece of germanium, doped appropriately, and directly control the current by applying an electric field across the flow path through a metal contact, fittingly called a gate. This would be a ‘field effect transistor’, or FET.


While Bell Labs’ Bardeen and Brattain produced the transistor, their team leader, Shockley, followed a different line; he was trying to invent the FET. Bardeen and Brattain beat him to inventing the transistor, and the flamboyant Shockley could never forget that his efforts failed while his team members’ approach worked. This disappointment left its mark on an otherwise brilliant career. Shockley’s initial effort did not succeed because the gate started drawing current. Putting an insulator between the metal and the semiconductor was a logical step, but efforts in this direction failed until researchers abandoned their favourite germanium for silicon.


We have already mentioned the better temperature range of silicon. But silicon had one major handicap: as soon as pure silicon was exposed to oxygen it ‘rusted’ and a highly insulating layer of silicon dioxide was formed on the surface. Researchers were frustrated by this silicon rusting.


Now that a layer of insulating material was needed between the gate and the semiconductor for making good FETs, and germanium did not generate insulating rust, silicon, which developed insulating rust as soon as it was exposed to oxygen, became a natural choice. Thus was born the ‘metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor’, or MOSFET. It is useful to remember this rather long acronym, since MOSFETs dominate the field of microelectronics today.


A type of MOSFET transistor called CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) was invented later. This had the great advantage of not only operating at low voltages but also dissipating the lowest amount of heat. A large number of CMOS transistors can be packed per square inch, depending on how sharp is the ‘knife’ used to cut super-thin grooves on thin wafers of silicon. Today CMOS is the preferred technology in all microchips.

INVENTION OF THE IC

The US military was pushing for the micro-miniaturisation of electronics. In 1958, Texas Instruments hired Jack Kilby, a young PhD, to work on a project funded by the US defence department. Kilby was asked if he could do something about a problem known as the ‘tyranny of numbers’. It was a wild shot. Nobody believed that the young man would solve it.


What was this ‘tyranny of numbers’, a population explosion? Yes, but of a different kind. As the number of electronic components increased in a system, the number of connecting wires and solders also increased. The fate of the whole system not only depended on whether every component worked but also whether every solder worked. Kilby began the search for a solution to this problem.


Americans, whether they are in industry or academia, have a tradition of taking a couple of weeks’ vacation during summer. In the summer of 1958, Kilby, who was a newcomer to his assignment, did not get his vacation and was left alone in his lab while everyone else went on holiday. The empty lab gave Kilby an opportunity to try out fresh ideas.


“I realised that semiconductors were all that were really required. The resistors and capacitors could be made from silicon, while germanium was used for transistors,” Kilby wrote in a 1976 article titled Invention of the IC. “My colleagues were skeptical and asked for some proof that circuits made entirely of semiconductors would work. I therefore built up a circuit using discrete silicon elements. By September, I was ready to demonstrate a working integrated circuit built on a piece of semiconductor material.”


Several executives, including former Texas Instruments chairman Mark Shepherd, gathered for the event on 12 September 1958. What they saw was a sliver of germanium, with protruding wires, glued to a glass slide It was a rough device, but when Kilby pressed the switch the device showed clear amplification with no distortion. His invention worked. He had solved the problem—and he had invented the integrated circuit.


Did Kilby realise the significance of his achievement? “I thought it would be important for electronics as we knew it then, but that was a much simpler business,” said Kilby when the author interviewed him in October 2000 in Dallas, Texas, soon after the announcement of his Nobel Prize award. “Electronics was mostly radio and television and the first computers. What we did not appreciate was how lower costs would expand the field of electronics beyond imagination. It still surprises me today. The real story has been in the cost reduction, which has been much greater than anyone could have anticipated.”


The unassuming Kilby was a typical engineer who wanted to solve problems. In his own words, his interest in electronics was kindled when he was a kid growing up in Kansas. “My dad was running a small power company scattered across the western part of Kansas. There was this big ice storm that took down all the telephones and many of the power lines, so he began to work with amateur radio operators to provide some communications. That was the beginning of my interest in electronics.”


His colleagues at Texas Instruments challenged Kilby to find a use for his integrated circuits and suggested that he work on an electronic calculator to replace large mechanical ones. This led to the successful invention of the electronic calculator. In the 1970s calculators made by
Texas Instruments were a prized possession among engineering students. In a short period of time the electronic calculator replaced the old slide rule in all scientific and engineering institutions. It can truly be called the first mass consumer product of integrated electronics.


Meanwhile, Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, had walked out of Bell Labs to start Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories in California. He assembled a team consisting of Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and others. However, though Shockley was a brilliant scientist, he was a poor manager of men. Within a year, a team of eight scientists led by Noyce and Moore left Shockley Semiconductors to start a semiconductor division for Fairchild Camera Inc.


Said Moore, “We had a few other ideas coming along at that time. One of them was something called a planar transistor, created by Jean Hoerni, a Caltech post-doc. Jean was a theoretician, and so was not very useful when we were building furnaces and all that kind of stuff. He just sat in his office, scribbling things on a piece of paper, and he came up with this idea for building a transistor by growing a silicon oxide layer over the junctions. Nobody had ever tried leaving the oxide on. When we finally got around to trying it, it turned out to be a great idea; it solved all the previous surface problems. Then we wondered what else we might do with this planar technology. Robert Noyce came up with the two key inventions to make a practical integrated circuit: by leaving the oxide on, one could run interconnections as metal films over the top of its devices; and one could also put structures inside the silicon that isolated one transistor from the other.”


While Kilby’s invention had individual circuit elements connected together with gold wires, making the circuit difficult to scale up, Hoerni and Noyce’s planar technology set the stage for complex integrated circuits. Their ideas are still the basis of the process used today. Though Kilby got the Nobel Prize, Noyce and Kilby share the credit of coming up with the crucial innovations that made an integrated circuit possible.


After successfully developing the IC business at Fairchild Semiconductors, Noyce and Moore were again bit by the entrepreneurial bug. In 1968 they seeded a new company, Intel, which stood for Integrated Electronics. Intel applied the IC technology to manufacture semiconductor-based memory and then invented the microprocessor. These two concepts have powered the personal computer revolution of the last two decades.


In Kilby and Noyce’s days, one could experiment easily with IC technology. “No equipment cost more than $10,000 during those days,” says Kilby. Today chip fabrication plants, called ‘Fabs’, cost as much as two to three billion dollars.


Let us look at the main steps involved in fabricating a chip today in a company like Intel. If you are a cooking enthusiast then it might remind you of a layered cake. Craig Barret, explained the process in an article in 1998: ‘From Sand to Silicon: Manufacturing an Integrated Circuit’.

‘PRINTING’ CHIPS

The chip-making process, in its essence, resembles the screen-printing process used in the textile industry. When you have a complicated, multi coloured design to be printed on a fabric, the screen printer takes a picture of the original, transfers it to different silk screens by a photographic process, and then uses each screen as a stencil while the dye is rolled over the screen. One screen is used for each colour. The only difference is in the size of the design. With dress material, print sizes run into square metres; with chips, containing millions of transistors (the Pentium-4, for example, has fifty-five million transistors), each transistor occupies barely a square micron. How is such miniature design achieved?



There are all kinds of superfine works of art, including calligraphy of a few words on a grain of rice. But the same grain of rice can accommodate a complicated circuit containing about 3,000 transistors! How do chipmakers pull off something so incredible?


In a way, the chip etcher’s approach is not too different from that of the calligraphist writing on a grain of rice. While the super-skilled calligraphist uses an ordinary watchmaker’s eyepiece as a magnifying glass, the chipmaker uses very short wavelength light (ultraviolet light) and sophisticated optics to reduce the detailed circuit diagrams to a thousandth of their size. These films are used to create stencils (masks) made of materials that are opaque to light.


The masks are then used to cast shadows on photosensitive coatings on the silicon wafer, using further miniaturisation with the help of laser light, electron beams and ultra-sophisticated optics to imprint the circuit pattern on the wafer.


The process is similar to the good old printing technology called lithography, where the negative image of a text or graphic is transferred to a plate covered with photosensitive material, which is then coated by ink that is transferred to paper pressed against the plates by rollers. This explains why the process of printing a circuit on silicon is called photolithography.


Of course, we are greatly simplifying the chip-making methodology for the sake of explaining the main ideas. In actual fact, several layers of materials—semiconductors and metals—have to be overlaid on each other, with appropriate insulation separating them. Chipmakers use several sets of masks, just as newspaper or textile printers use different screens to imprint different colours in varied patterns.


While ordinary printing transfers flat images on paper or fabric, chipmakers create three-dimensional structures of micro hills and vales by using a host of chemicals for etching the surface of the silicon wafer.


The fineness of this process is measured by how thin a channel you can etch on silicon. So, when someone tells you about 0.09-micron technology being used by leading chipmakers, they are referring to hitech scalpels that can etch channels as thin as 0.09 micron.



To get a sense of proportion, that is equivalent to etching 350 parallel ridges and vales on a single strand of human hair!


Only a couple of years ago, most fabs used 0.13-micron technology; today, many leading fabs have commercialised 0.09-micron technology and are experimenting with 0.065-micron technology in their labs.


What does this mean? Well, roughly each new technology is able to etch a transistor in half the surface area of the silicon wafer than the previous one. Lo and behold, the “secret” of Moore’s Law of doubling transistor density on a chip!

WHY MOORE’S LAW MUST END

What are the problems in continuing this process? Making the scalpels sharper is one. Sharper scalpels mean using shorter and shorter wavelengths of light for etching. But, as the wavelength shortens we reach the X-ray band, and we do not yet have X-ray lasers or optics of good quality in that region.


There is another hurdle. As circuit designs get more complex and etching gets thinner, the masks too become thinner. A law in optics says that if the dimensions of the channels in a mask are of the order of the wavelength of light, then, instead of casting clear shadows, the masks will start ‘diffracting’—bands of bright and dark regions would be created around the edges of the shadow, thereby limiting the production of sharply defined circuits.


Moreover, as the channels get thinner there are greater chances of electrons from one channel crossing over to the other due to defects, leading to a large number of chips failing at the manufacturing stage.


Surprisingly, though, ingenious engineers have overcome the hurdles and come up with solutions that have resulted in further miniaturisation. Until now Moore’s Law has remained a self-fulfilling prophecy.

EXTENDING THE TENURE OF MOORE’S LAW

What has been achieved so far has been extraordinary. But it has not been easy. At every stage, engineers have had to fine-tune various elements of the manufacturing process and the chips themselves.


For example, in the late 1970s, when memory chipmakers faced the problem of limited availability of surface, they found an innovative answer to the problem. “The dilemma was,” says Pallab Chatterjee, “should we build skyscrapers or should we dig underground into the substrate and build basements and subways?”


While working at Texas Instruments in the 1970s and 1980s, Chatterjee played a major role in developing reliable micro transistors and developing the ‘trenching’ technology for packing more and more of them per square centimetre. This deep sub-micron technology resulted in the capacity of memory chips leapfrogging from kilobytes to megabytes. Texas Instruments was the first to introduce a 4 MB DRAM memory, back in 1985. Today, when we can buy 128 MB or 256 MB memory chips in any electronics marketplace for a few thousand rupees, this may seem trite; but the first 4 MB DRAM marked a big advance in miniaturisation.


Another person of Indian origin, Tom Kailath, a professor of communication engineering and information theory at Stanford University in the US, developed signal processing techniques to compensate for the diffractive effects of masks. A new company, Numerical Technologies, has successfully commercialised Kailath’s ideas. Kailath’s contribution was an instance of the cross-fertilisation of technologies, with ideas from one field being applied to solve problems in a totally different field. Well known as a leading academic and teacher, Kailath takes great satisfaction in seeing some of his highly mathematical ideas getting commercialized in a manufacturing environment.


Another leading researcher in semiconductor technology who has contributed to improving efficiencies is Krishna Saraswat, also at Stanford University. “When we were faced with intense competition from Japanese chipmakers in the 1980s, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a leading financer of hi-tech projects in the US, undertook an initiative to improve fabrication efficiencies in the American semiconductor industry,” says Chatterjee. “We at Texas Instruments collaborated with Saraswat at Stanford, and the team solved the problems of efficient batch processing of silicon wafers.”

HIGH-COST BARRIERS

One of the ways diligent Japanese companies became more efficient than the Americans was by paying attention to ‘clean-room’ conditions. Chatterjee and Saraswat spotted it and brought about changes in manufacturing techniques that made the whole US chip industry competitive. One of Saraswat’s main concerns today is to reduce the time taken by signals to travel between chips and even within chips. “The ‘interconnects’ between chips can become the limiting factor to chip speeds, even before problems are faced at the nano-physics level,” he explains.


Every step of the chip-manufacturing process has to be conducted in ultra dust-free clean rooms; every gas or chemical used—including water and the impurities used for doping—have to be ultra pure! When the author visited the Kilby Centre (a state-of-the-art R&D centre set up by Texas Instruments and named after its most famous inventor) at Dallas in the year 2000, they were experimenting with 0.90-micron technology. The technicians inside the clean rooms resembled astronauts in spacesuits.


All this translates into the high capital costs of chip fabrication facilities today. In the 1960s it cost a couple of million dollars to set up a fab; today it costs a thousand times more. The high cost of the fabs creates entry barriers to newcomers in microelectronics. Besides, chip making is still an art and not really a science. Semiconductor companies use secret recipes and procedures much like gourmet cooking. Even today, extracting the maximum from a fab is the key to success in semiconductor manufacturing.


If the capital costs are so high, how are chips getting cheaper? The answer lies in volumes. A new fab might cost, say, five billion dollars, but if it doubles the number of transistors on a chip and produces chips in the hundreds of millions, then the additional cost per chip is marginal, even insignificant. Having produced high-performance chips with new technology, the manufacturer also receives an extra margin on each chip for a year or so and recovers most of its R&D and capital costs. After that the company can continue to fine-tune the plant, while reducing the price, and still remain profitable on thin margins.

THE ENTRAILS OF A CHIP

Though the transistor was invented to build an amplifier, the primary use of the transistor in a chip today is as a switch—a device that conducts or does not conduct, depending on the voltage applied to the gate. The ‘on’ state represents a 1 and the ‘off’ state represents a 0, and we have the basic building block of digital electronics. These elements are then used to design logic gates.


What are logic gates? They are not very different from ordinary gates, which let people pass through if they have the requisite credentials. A fundamental gate from which all other logic gates can be built is called a NAND gate. It compares two binary digital inputs, which can be either 1 or 0. If the values of both inputs are 1, then the output value is 0; but if the value of one input is 0 and that of the other is 1, or if the values of both inputs are 0, the output value is 1.


These gates can be configured to carry out higher-level functions. Today chips are designed with millions of such gates to carry out complex functions such as microprocessors in computers or digital signal processors in cell phones.


Simpler chips are used in everyday appliances. Called microcontrollers, they carry out simple functions like directing the electronic fuel injection system in your car, adjusting contrast, brightness and volume in your TV set, or starting different parts of the wash cycle at the right time in your washing machine.


“Earlier, there used to be audio amplifiers with four transistors; today even a simple audio chip has 2,000 transistors,” says Sorab Ghandhi, who, in 1953, wrote the first-ever book on transistor circuit design.

DID INDIA MISS THE MICROCHIP BUS?

Vinod Dham, who joined Intel in the mid-1970s and later led the project that created the Pentium, the most successful Intel chip to date, has an interesting story to tell. He says: “Gurpreet Singh, who, back in the sixties, founded Continental Devices—one of the first semiconductor companies in India and the place where I cut my teeth in the early seventies—told me that Bob Noyce came and stayed with him in Delhi in the sixties. Noyce spent fifteen days trying to convince the Indian government to allow Intel to establish a chip company in India!”


The Indian government rejected the proposal. Why did it adopt such an attitude towards electronics and computers in general? It seems inexplicable.


There are many horror stories told by industry veterans about how many times India missed the bus. According to Bishnu Pradhan, who led the R&D centre at Tata Electric Companies for two decades and later led C-DOT (Centre for Development of Telematics), prototypes of personal computers were being made in India way back in the 1970s. These PCs were as sophisticated as those being developed in the Silicon Valley. But the Indian government discouraged these attempts on one pretext or another. That is why, while India has supplied chip technologists to other countries, several countries, which were way behind India in the 1960s, are today leagues ahead of us. Taiwan and South Korea are two such examples.


Even the much touted software industry in India had to struggle due to the lack of computers. People like F.C. Kohli, who led Tata Consultancy Services for three decades, had to spend a lot of time and effort convincing the government to allow the import of computers to develop software.
In the case of nuclear and space technologies, Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan fully utilised foreign assistance, know-how and training to catch up with the rest of the world. Only when other countries denied these technologies to them did they invest R&D resources in developing them indigenously. They were not dogmatic; they were global in outlook and cared for national interests as well. Unfortunately, India missed that kind of leadership in policy-making in electronics and computers.


After much confabulation, the Indian government bought a fab in the 1980s and established the Semiconductor Complex Ltd at Chandigarh. But the facility was burnt down in a fire in the mid-eighties. It has since been rebuilt, but it was too little too late. SCL’s technology remains at the one-micron level while the world has moved to 0.09 micron.


A modern fab in the country would have given a boost to Indian chip designers; they could not only have designed chips but also tested their innovative designs by manufacturing in small volumes. The fab could have accommodated such experiments while doing other, high-volume work for its regular business. Today SCL has opened its doors for such projects but, according to many experts, it is uncompetitive.

SOFTENING OF THE HARDWARE

If India is uncompetitive in this business, how should one interpret newspaper reports about young engineers in Bangalore and Pune designing cutting-edge chips? How has that happened?


This has been made possible by another major development in semiconductor technology: separation of the hardware from the software. What does this mean? That you can have somebody designing a chip in some place on his workstation—a powerful desktop computer—and get it fabricated elsewhere. There is a separation of chip design and fabrication. As a result, there are fabs that just fabricate chips, and there are ‘fabless chip companies’ which only design chips. Some enthusiasts call them ‘fabulous chip companies’.


It is not very different from the separation that took place long ago between the civil engineers who build houses and the architects who design them. If we go a step further and devise programmes to convert the ideas of architects into drawings on the computer, they are called ‘computer aided design’, or CAD, packages.


Interestingly, in 1980, when Vinod Khosla, a twenty-five-year-old engineer, started a CAD software company, Daisy Systems, to help in chip design, he found that such software needed powerful workstations, which did not then exist. That led to Khosla joining Andreas
Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy to co-found Sun Microsystems in the spring of 1982.


Khosla recalls, “When I was fifteen-sixteen and living in Delhi, I read about Intel, a company started by a couple of PhDs. Those days I used to go to Shankar Market and rent old issues of electronics trade journals in order to follow developments. Starting a hi-tech business was my dream long before I went to the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. In 1975, even before I finished my B.Tech, I tried to start a company. But in those days you couldn’t do this in India if your father did not have ‘connections’. That’s why I resonate with role models. Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove at Intel became role models for me.”


Today Sun is a broad-based computer company. Khosla was the chief executive of Sun when he left the company in 1985 and became a venture capitalist. Today he is a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers and is voted, year on year, with boring repetition, as a top-notch venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, Sun workstations continue to dominate chip design.


CAD is only a drawing tool that automates the draughtsman’s work. How do you convert the picture of a transistor into a real transistor on silicon? How do you pack a lot of transistors on the chip without them overlapping or interfering with each other’s function? Can you go up the ladder of abstraction and convert the logical operations expressed in Boolean equations into transistor circuits? Can you take one more step and give the behaviour of a module in your circuitry and ask the tool to convert that into a circuit?


Designing a circuit from scratch, using the principles of circuit design, would take a lot of time and money. There would be too many errors, and each designer would have his own philosophy, which might not be transparent to the next one who wished to debug it. Today’s tools can design circuits if you tell them what functionality you want. Which means that if you write down your specifications in a higher-level language, the tools will convert them into circuits.


What sounded like a wish list from an electronics engineer has become a reality in the last forty years, thanks to electronic design automation, or EDA, tools. The trend to develop such tools started in the 1960s and ’70s but largely remained the proprietary technology of chipmakers. Yet, thanks to EDA tools, today’s hardware designers use methods similar to those that software designers use—they write programs and let tools generate the implementation. Special languages known as hardware description languages have been developed to do this. That is the secret behind designers in Bangalore and Pune developing cutting-edge chips.
In a sense, India is catching the missed electronics bus at a different place, one called chip design.
Interestingly, several Indians have played a pioneering role in developing design tools. Raj Singh, a chip designer who co-authored one of the earliest and most popular books on hardware description languages, and later went on to build several start-ups, talks of Suhas Patil. “Suhas had set up Patil Systems Inc. as a chip-design company in Utah based upon his research in Storage Logic Arrays at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” says Singh. “He moved it later to the Silicon Valley as SLA Systems to sell IC design tools. Finding it difficult to sell tools, he changed the business to customer-specific ICs using his SLA toolkit and founded Cirrus Logic as a fabless semiconductor company.”


Verilog, a powerful hardware description language, was a product of Gateway Automation, founded by Prabhu Goel in Boston. Goel had worked on EDA tools at IBM from 1973-82 and then left IBM to start Gateway. Goel’s Gateway was also one of the first companies to establish its development centre in India.

BANGALORE BLOOMS

The first multinational company to establish a development centre in India was the well-known chip company Texas Instruments, which built a facility in Bangalore in 1984. The company’s engineers in Bangalore managed to communicate directly with TI in Dallas via a direct satellite link—another first. This was India’s first brush with hi-tech chip design.


“Today TI, Bangalore, clearly is at the core of our worldwide network and has proved that cutting-edge work can be done in India,” says K. Bala, chief operating officer at TI, Japan, who was earlier in charge of the Kilby Centre in Dallas. “We have produced over 200 patents and over 100 products for Texas Instruments in the last five years with a staff that constitutes just two per cent of our global workforce,” says a proud Bobby Mitra, the managing director of the company’s Indian operations.


The success of Texas Instruments has not only convinced many other multinational companies like Analog Devices, National Semiconductor and Intel to build large chip-designing centres in India, it has also led to the establishment of Indian chip design companies. “Indian technologists like Vishwani Agarwal of Bell Labs have helped bring international exposure to Indian chip designers by organising regular international conferences on VLSI design in India,” says Juzer Vasi of IIT, Bombay, which has become a leading educational centre for microelectronics.

DESIGNS ON DESIGN

Where are we heading next from the design point of view? “Each new generation of microprocessors that is developed using old design tools leads to new and more powerful workstations, which can design more complex chips, and hence the inherent exponential nature of growth in chip complexity,” says Goel.


“The next big thing will be the programmable chip,” says Suhas Patil. Today if you want to develop a chip that can be used for a special purpose in modest numbers, the cost is prohibitive. The cost of a chip comes down drastically only when it is manufactured in the millions. Patil hopes that the advent of programmable chips will allow the design of any kind of circuit on it by just writing a programme in C language. “Electronics will become a playground for bright software programmers, who are in abundant numbers in India, but who may not know a thing about circuits,” says Patil. “This will lead to even more contributions from India.”


There is another aspect of chip making and it’s called testing and verification. How do you test and verify that the chip will do what it has been designed to? “Testing a chip can add about fifty per cent to the cost of the chip,” says Janak Patel of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Patel designed some of the first testing and verification software. Today chips are being designed while keeping the requirements of testing software in mind. With the growth in complexity of chips, there is a corresponding growth in testing and verification software.

THE OTHER WONDERS

While the main application of semiconductors has been in integrated circuits, the story will not be complete without mentioning a few other wonders of the sand castle.


While CMOS has led to micro-miniaturisation and lower and lower power applications, the Integrated Gate Bipolar Transistors, or IGBT— co-invented by Jayant Baliga at General Electric in the 1970s—rule the roost in most control devices. These transistors are in our household mixers and blenders, in Japanese bullet trains, and in the heart defibrillators used to revive patients who have suffered heart attacks, to name a few applications. The IGBTs can handle megawatts of power. “It may not be as big as the IC industry but the IGBT business has spawned a billion-dollar industry and filled a need. That is very satisfying,” says Jayant Baliga, who is trying to find new applications for his technology at Silicon Semiconductor Corporation, the company he founded at Research Triangle Park in Raleigh, North Carolina.


As we saw earlier, certain properties of silicon, such as its oxide layer, and the amount of research done on silicon have created an unassailable position for this material. However, new materials (called compound semiconductors or alloys) have come up strongly to fill the gaps in silicon’s capabilities.


Gallium arsenide, gallium nitride, silicon carbide, silicon-germanium and several multi-component alloys containing various permutations and combinations of gallium, aluminium, arsenic, indium and phosphorus have made a strong foray into niche areas. “Compound semiconductors have opened the door to all sorts of optical devices, including solar cells, light emitting diodes, semiconductor lasers and tiny quantum well lasers,” says Sorab Ghandhi, who did pioneering work in gallium arsenide in the 1960s and ’70s.


“Tomorrow’s lighting might come from semiconductors like gallium nitride,” says Umesh Mishra of the University of California at Santa Barbara. He and his colleagues have been doing some exciting work in this direction. “A normal incandescent bulb lasts about 1,000 hours and a tube light lasts 10,000 hours, but a gallium nitride light emitting diode display can last 100,000 hours while consuming very little power,” says IIT Mumbai’s Rakesh Lal, who wants to place his bet on gallium nitride for many new developments.


Clearly, semiconductors have broken barriers of all sorts. With their low price, micro size and low power consumption, they have proved to be wonder materials. An amazing journey this, after being dubbed “dirty” in the thirties.


To sum up the achievement of chip technology, if a modern-day cell phone were to be made of vacuum tubes instead of ICs, it would be as tall as the Qutub Minar, and would need a small power plant to run it!

FURTHER READING

1.Nobel Lecture—John Bardeen, 1956 (http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1956/bardeen-lecture.html )


2. Nobel Lecture—William Shockley, 1956
(http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1956/shockley-io.html )


3. The Solid State Century, Scientific American, Special issue, Jan. 22, 1998 Cramming more components onto integrated circuits—Gordon E Moore, Electronics, Vol 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965


4. The Accidental Entrepreneur—Gordon E Moore, Engineering & Science, Summer 1994, vol. LVII, no. 4, California Institute of Technology.


5. Nobel Lecture 2000—Jack Kilby (http://www.nobel.se/physics/ laureates/2000/kilby-lecture.html )


6. When the chips are up: Jack Kilby, inventor of the IC, gets his due with the Physics Nobel Prize 2000, after 42 years—Shivanand Kanavi, Business India, Nov. 13-16, 2000
(http://reflections-shivanand.blogspot.com/2007/08/jack-kilby-tribute.html )


7. From Sand to Silicon: Manufacturing an Integrated Circuit—Craig R. Barrett, Scientific American, Jan 22, 1998


8. The work of Jagdish Chandra Bose: 100 years of mm-Wave Research—D.T. Emerson, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Arizona (http://www.qsl.net/vu2msy/JCBOSE.htm)

9. The Softening of Hardware—Frank Vahid, Computer, April 2003, Published by IEEE Computer Society

Sand to Silicon-Shivanand Kanavi, Internet Edition-1

SAND TO SILICON
The amazing story of digital technology


SHIVANAND KANAVI
Copyright © Tata Sons Ltd.

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Photographs: Palashranjan Bhaumick
First Published by
Tata McGraw Hill 2004
Published by Rupa & Co. 2006

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Of Chips and Wafers
Computers: Augmenting the Brain
Nirvana of Personal Computing
Telecommunications: Death of Distance
Optical Technology: Lighting up our Lives
Internet
Epilogue: The Collective Genius

Press Reviews
Mr Shivanand Kanavi's maiden book covers the entire gamut of developments in semiconductors, computers, fibre optics, telecommunications, optical technologies and the Internet, while holding a light up to the genius, individual and collective, that brought the digital dream to throbbing life.
-Deccan Herald

Repaints digital history from the perspective of the contribution of myriad brilliant Indian scientists, researchers, academicians and entrepreneurs, all of whom played a critical role in technological breakthroughs that have made IT what it is today.
-Express Computers

For someone, who would like to know how the World Wide Web came into being, or what a chip really does, Sand to Silicon has all the answers. Surprisingly easy to understand, considering the complexity of the subject. Mr Kanavi simplifies technology for the common man, using ordinary, if unusual metaphors. His book is international enough to be about technology in general, but he takes care to underscore the Indian contribution to global advances in technology.
-Financial Express

Chronicles possibly for the first time-the story from a 'desi' perspective and weaves Indian achievers and achievements into the very fabric of IT and its brief international history. Reading it, will make every Indian proud.
-The Hindu

Response
August 9, 2004
Dear Shri Shivanand Kanavi,
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book "Sand to Silicon: The amazing story of digital technology. I have gone through the book and particularly I liked the chapters "Optical Technology: Lighting up our lives" (page 178) and "Epilogue: The Collective Genius" (page 243). My best wishes.
Yours sincerely,
A.P.J.Abdul Kalam
Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi. 110004

“Kanavi is a gifted writer in the mold of Isaac Assimov. He explains science and technology in a simple manner. This enables hi readers with little exposure to science to understand technology, its phenomena and processes. His book Sand to Silicon starts with the invention of the transistor, which led to digital electronics, integrated circuits, computers and communications. He narrates developments such that readers feel they are participating in the whole process. He also gives a human face to technology by talking about the persons behind it. Everyone who reads Sand to Silicon, irrespective of their background in science of arts, will get deep insight in the world of digital electronic, which had touched our lives from High Definition TVs to mobile phones.”
-F C KOHLI, IT pioneer

“We are witness to the way information and Communications Technology (ICT) is revolutionizing everything around us today. Shivanand Kanavi provides a compelling and breathtaking account of the science and technology that went into this revolution, with simplicity and elegance that is the hallmark of his writings. Equally fascinating is his account of the role of the ‘Indian genius’ in powering the ICT revolution, with the rarest of rare insights acquired through painstaking research, this masterpiece is ‘must’ for everyone.”
-R A MASHELKAR, FRS, Former DIRECTOR GENERAL, CSIR

“Sand to Silicon is elegant in its simplicity. Any non-engineer whose world is touched by micro-electronics, software and telecommunications needs to read it, because it brings understanding of these technologies within all of our reach.”
-PROF CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN, HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

“Presents extremely complex scientific concepts in an easy to understand manner…this book provides a good foundation of the key building blocks. Should be a required reading for all IT practitioners.”
-YASHIRO MASAMOTO, CHAIRMAN, SHINSEI BANK, JAPAN

“There is proverb in Marathi, which roughly translates into, ‘with committed efforts one can even squeeze oil out of sand’. Sand to Silicon is a saga of human ingenuity and efforts in realizing ever better results, which have made a paradigm shift in the history of human development. I would like to compliment Shivanand Kanavi for bringing out this book, which I am sure, would benefit all those readers who are interested in today’s technology revolution.”
-ANIL KAKODKAR, Former CHAIRMAN, ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION




ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Words in this section appear customary, but are entirely true. A project this ambitious would not have been possible without the enthusiastic help of literally, hundreds of people. However, inadequacies in the book are solely mine.
Tata Sons supported the author financially during the research and writing of the book, without which this book would not have been possible. However, the views expressed in this book are entirely those of the author and do not represent those of the Tata Group.
I acknowledge with gratefulness the contributions made by:

• R. Gopalakrishnan, of the Tata Group for championing the project through thick and thin, without whose encouragement Sand to Silicon would have remained a gleam in the author's eyes.
• S. Ramadorai of TCS for his constant encouragement and support in my efforts at communication of science and technology to lay persons and for writing a valuable Introduction to this edition ..
• F.C. Kohli for providing insights and perspective on many issues in global technology and business history.
• Ashok Advani, of Business India for mentoring me and turning a theoretical physicist and an essayist like me into a business journalist.
• Kesav Nori (TCS), Juzer Vasi (lIT,B), Ashok Jhunjhunwala (lIT,M), Bishnu Pradhan, Sorab Ghandhi, Jai Singh, Umesh Vazirani CUC Berkeley), Kannan Kasturi, and YR. Mehta (Tata Motors) for taking time off to give detailed feedback on various chapters.
• My publisher, Kapish Mehra of Rupa & Co for publishing the new
edition.
• Sanjana Roy Choudhury for excellent editing of this edition.
• Satyabrata Sahu for diligently checking the proofs.
• Hundreds of experts who patiently shared their valuable time, their knowledge-base and friendship:
AV Balakrishnan (UCLA), Abhay Bhushan, Amar Bose (Bose Corp), Arogyasami Paul Raj (Stanford U), Arun Netravali, Aravind Joshi, Avtar Saini, Bala Manian (Saraswati Partners), Balaji Prabhakar (Stanford U), Basavraj Pawate (TI), Bhaskar Ramamurthy (IIT, M), Birendra Prasada, Bishnu Atal, Bishnu Pradhan, Bob Taylor,
Bobby Mitra (TI), Chandra Kudsia, C.K.N. Mangla, C.K.N. Patel (Pranalytica), C Mohan (IBM, Almaden), D.B. Phatak (IIT,B), Debasis Mitra (Bell Labs), Desh Deshpande (Sycamore Networks), Dinesh (IIT, B), F.C Kohli (Tata Group), H. Kesavan (U of Waterloo), Jack Kilby, Jai Menon (IBM, Almaden), Jai Singh, Jayant Baliga (NC State U), Jitendra Mallik (UC Berkeley), Jnaan Dash, (Sonata Software), Juzer Vasi (IIT, B), K. Bala (TI), K. Kasturirangan (NIAS), K Mani Chandy (Caltech), Kamal Badada (TCS), Kanwal Rekhi, Kesav Nori (TCS), Keshav Parhi (U of Minnesota), Krishna Saraswat (Stanford U), Kriti Amritalingam (IIT, B), Kumar Sivarajan (Tejas Networks), Kumar Wikramasinghe (IBM, Almaden), Luv Grover (Bell Labs), M. Vidyasagar (TCS), Madhusudan (MIT), Manmohan Sondhi (Avaya),
Mathai Joseph (TRDDC), Mohan Tambay, Mriganka Sur (MIT), N. Jayant (Georgia Tech), N. Vinay (IISc), N. Yegnanarayana (IIT, M), Nambinarayanan, Nandan Nilekani (lnfosys), Narendra Karmarkar, Narinder Singh Kapany, Naveen Jain, Neera Singh (Telecom Ventures), Niloy Dutta (U Conn), PP Vaidyanathan (Caltech), P Venkatarangan (UC San Diego), Pallab Bhattacharya (U Michigan), Pallab Chatterji (I2), Prabhu Goel, Pradeep Khosla (CMU), Pradeep Sindhu (Juniper Networks), Prakash Bhalerao, Pramod Kale, Praveen Chaudhari , R. Narasimhan, Raghavendra Cauligi (USC), Raj Reddy (CMU), Raj Singh (Sonoa Systems), Rajendra Singh (Telecom Ventures), Rajeev Motwani (Stanford U), Rajeev Sangal (IIIT, Hyd), Rakesh Agarwal (IBM, Almaden), Rakesh Lal (IIT,B), Ramalinga Raju (Satyam), Ramesh Agarwal (IBM, Almaden), Ravi Kannan (Yale), Roddam Narasimha (IISc), S. Keshav (U of Waterloo), S. Mittal (I2), Sam Pitroda, Sanjit Mitra (UC Santa Barbara), Sanjiv Sidhu (I2), Sorab Ghandhi, Subra Suresh (MIT), Timothy Gonsalves (IIT, M), Tom Kailath (Stanford U), U.R. Rao, Umesh Mishra (UC Santa Barbara), Umesh Vazirani (UC Berkeley), Upamanyu Madhow (UC Santa Barbara),
V Rajaraman (IISc), VVS. Sarma (IISc),Venky Narayanamurthy (Harvard U), Vijay Chandru (IISc), Vinay Chaitanya, Vinay Deshpande (Ncore), Vinod Khosla (KPCB), Vijay Madisetti (Georgia Tech), Vijay Vashee, Vinton Cerf (Google), Vivek Mehra (August Capita)), Vivek Ranadive (TIBCO), Yogen Dalal (Mayfield Ventures).
• Mike Ross at IBM and Saswato Das at Bell Labs for making interviews possible at T.J. Watson Research Centre, Yorktown Heights, Almaden Research Centre and at Bell Labs, Murray Hills.
• Christabelle Noronha, of the Tata Group for coordinating varied parts of this complex project with remarkable drive.
• T.R. Doongaji, FN. Subedar, Romit Chatterji, R.R. Shastri, K.R. Bhagat, Juthika Choksi Hariharan of the Tata Group for providing invaluable infrastructural support.
• Delphine Almeida and B. Prakash of TCS for providing library support. Elsy Dias, Fiona Pinto and Sujatha Nair for secretarial help.
• Radhakrish nan, Debabrata Paine, Raj Patil, Iqbal Singh, Anand Patil, Srinivas Rajan and innumerable friends in TCS and Tata Infotech, for their hospitality in North America.
• Raj Singh, K.V Kamath, Arjun Gupta, Arun Netravali, Kanwal Rekhi, Jai Singh, R. Mashelkar, Desh Deshpande and Jacob John for encouragement during the incubation of the project.
• Balle, Madhu, Geetha, Sanjoo, Ashok, Pradip, Revathi, Kannan and Bharat for friendship and inputs.
• Palashranjan Bhaumick for visually recording the interviews and invaluable support at various stages of the project.

• My parents, Chennaveera Kanavi and Shanthadevi Kanavi and in laws Col. Gopalan Kasturi and Lakshmi Kasturi who inspired me to become a writer.

• Last but not the least my wife Radhika and children Rahul and Usha for very generously writing off all my idiosyncrasies as due to "writing stress".

For hundreds of people in the IT Industry and academia who looked at it as their own project and gave contacts and suggestions.
Shivanand Kanavi



PROLOGUE
Due to the success of the software industry in India, Information Technology has become synonymous with software or computers. But that is a very narrow view. Modern day IT is a product of the convergence of computing and communication technologies. It is not surprising that there is a computer within every telephone and a telephone within every computer.

The technologies that form the foundation of IT, which have made it accessible and affordable to hundreds of millions of people, are: semiconductors, microchips, lasers and fibre optics.

IT has emerged as a technology that has radically changed the old ways of doing many things-be it governance, manufacturing, banking, communicating, trading commodities and shares, or even going to the university or the public library! It has the potential to disrupt the .economic, social and political status quo.

Then why should we welcome it? Well, there are disruptions and disruptions. Disruption means drastically altering or destroying the structure of something. So whether the disruptive potential of anything is to be welcomed or opposed depends on what it disrupts: the old, the stale, the iniquitous and the oppressive; or the young, the fresh and the just.

If a technology has the potential to empower the individual, enhance his or her faculties and capabilities, then it has to be welcomed. Similarly, if a technology increases the possibilities of cooperation, collaboration or communication and break hierarchical and sectarian barriers, then, too, it should be welcomed.

However, modern Information Technology can do both. That is why the individualists like it and so do the collectivists. But the two categories have been wrongly posed in the twentieth century as opposites. Neither the individual nor any collective can claim supremacy. The individual and the collective have to harmonise relations among themselves to lead to a higher level of society. That is the message of the twenty-first century, and IT is an enabling technology for bringing about such harmony.

That is the reason I have chosen a seeming oxymoron-creative disruption-to describe the effect of IT. It will disrupt sects, cliques, power brokers and knowledge and information monopolies. It will extend the democracy that we tasted in the twentieth century to new and higher levels.

In the twenty-first century, the individual will flower, the collective will empower and IT will enable this. Mind you, I am not advocating that technology by itself will bring about a revolution. It can't; it has to be brought about by humans and no status quo can be altered without a fight.

Today, nobody can ignore IT. It is proliferating all around us. Modern cars have forty to fifty microprocessors inside them to control navigation, fuel injection, braking, suspension, entertainment, climate control and so on. Even the lowly washing machines, colour TVs and microwave ovens have chips controlling them. DVDs, VCDs, MP3 players, TV remote controls, cell phones, digital diaries, ATMs, cable TV, the Internet, dinosaurs in movies, email, chat and so on are all products of IT.

Hence, awareness of the fascinating story of IT is becoming a necessity.

This book is a modest attempt to espouse IT's evolution, achievements, potential and intellectual challenges that have motivated some of the best minds in the world to participate in its creation.

The pervasive usefulness of IT makes us curious to go behind the boxes-PCs and modems-and find out how microchips, computers, telecom and the Internet came into being. Who were the key players and what were their key contributions? What were the underlying concepts in this complex set of technologies? What is the digital technology that is leading to the convergence of computers, communication, media, movies, music and education? Who have been the Indian scientists and technologists who played a significant role in this global saga and what did they actually do?

Without being parochial, it is important to publicise the Indian contribution to IT for its inspirational role for youth.

In the last two decades, we have seen some attitudinal changes too. The fear that computerisation will lead to mass unemployment has vanished. We have witnessed old jobs being done with new technology and new skills, and with the added bonus of efficiency and convenience. The transformation brought about at the reservation counters of the Indian Railways and in bank branches are examples of this. Moreover, several hundred thousand jobs have been created in the IT sector for software programmers and hardware engineers.

Today, we have a vibrant software services industry, built in the last thirty years by Indian entrepreneurs, which is computerising the rest of the world. Indian IT professionals have built a reputation all over the world as diligent problem solvers and as lateral thinkers. Hundreds of Indian engineers have not only contributed to the development of innovative technology but also succeeded as entrepreneurs in the most competitive environments. As R.A. Mashelkar says, “It is the convergence of Laxmi and Saraswati.”

A globalising world is discovering that world-class services can be provided by Indian accountants, financial experts, bankers, doctors, architects, designers, R&D scientists et at. Thanks to the development of modern telecom infrastructure, they can provide it without emigrating from India. In the seventies and eighties many of us used to lament that India had missed the electronics bus. Today, however, due to the development of skills in microchip design, engineers in India are designing cutting-edge chips, and communication software engineers are enabling state-of-the-art mobile phones and satellite phones.

While all this is laudable, it also begs a question: how will IT impact ordinary Indians? Can a farmer in Bareilly or Tanjavur; or a student in a municipal school in Mumbai; or a sick person in a rural health centre in hilly Garhwal; or an Adivasi child in Jhabua or Jharkhand benefit from an IT-enabled Indian nation? I believe they can, and must.

In this book, I have attempted to espouse a complex set of technologies in relatively simple terms. Stories and anecdotes have been recounted to give a flavour of the excitement. A bibliography is presented at the end of each chapter for the more adventurous reader, along with website addresses, where available.

Sarvajnya: A 16th C radical encyclopedic poet

Sarvajnya: A radical encyclopedic

Shivanand Kanavi draws a portrait of Sarvajnya, the radical poet who strode through Karnataka of 16th century, about whose personal life little is known

A group of writers led by Diderot, d’Alembert, Rousseau and Voltaire, created the Encyclopedia in 18th century France and thus came to be known as Encyclopedists. They were all fired with a common purpose: to further knowledge and, by so doing, strike a resounding blow against reactionary forces in the church and state. The underlying philosophy was rationalism and a qualified faith in the progress of the human mind. Their work proved to be far more revolutionary and radical than their contemporaries had envisioned and had an indelible impact on the French Revolution.

Roughly two hundred years prior to the French enlightenment, strode a poet all over Karnataka who also called himself an encyclopedic—a Sarvajnya. Normally in the Indian tradition there is great humility and display of one’s learning is frowned upon. The word Sarvajnya is more often used to ridicule those ignoramuses who act as ‘know-all’s. But Sarvajnya was unabashed and truly used his poetic skills to comment on all sorts of subjects from the daily life of people. His poems talk about agriculture and different professions; about the joys and problems of family life; about the caste system; about hollow religious rituals; about all the four goals in life, dharma, artha, kama and moksha and so on with a great sweep and with profound wisdom.

His tools were biting satire as well as gentle humour. At the same time these aphoristic pearls of wisdom became so popular that one could find manuscripts recording them in ordinary villagers’ homes as well as in royal palaces. In fact over a period of time, they have become substitutes for proverbs. Rev Chennappa Uttangi (1881-1962) did a yeoman service by traveling all over Karnataka for nearly a quarter century from village to village to collect and edit over 2000 of Sarvajnya’s vachanas or poems and published them in 1924. Sarvajnya is spoken of with the same affection and respect, by the ordinary folk and the learned alike as Vemana in Telugu and Tiruvalluvar in Tamil.

Sarvajnya’s poems are marked by high poetic qualities as well. Besides using analogies, allegories, alliteration, puns and double entendres they use simple pure Kannada words. Sarvajnya not only used the folk idiom and language but also a common folk metre called the tripadi—three liner and raised it to great heights. His amazing control over the form of tripadi has led to literary critics comparing him to the mythological Bali who is supposed to have used three foot steps to cover heaven earth and hell.

His influence over later poets is deep and extends up to the present day. He was greatly admired by D R Bendre (1896-1981), who himself was one of the great poets of 20th century. Bendre said of Sarvajnya, “His poems are like an instruction manual to all writers. They are marked by: the most appropriate choice of words; correct analogies and metaphors; the truth in his examples and allegories; breadth of experience and nuanced sensitivity of observations. The morals in his vachanas are not dry preachings; they are filled with the sensuality of subhashita and mixed with subtle humour”.

However other than what we learn of his rational world outlook and honest expression we know very little of this towering itinerant iconoclast who strode Karnataka nearly 500 years ago. Dating him is also rough and is based on the fact that a work written in 1600 CE refers to Sarvajnya. As for the faith or caste he was born into again there have been guesses but no confirmation. His vachanas indicate his leanings towards Veerashaivism. But it would be a sign of extreme narrow mindedness to put this radical in a straight jacket of faith and caste. Some autobiographical poems imply that he was born in Masoor near Dharwad.

A few of his vachanas have been translated below by the author. As is usual in such cases, translation can only give a sense of their content but not the literary and cultural richness.

The Yogi has no caste, the wise one is not stubborn
The sky has no pillar to hold it up, the heaven
Does not have a ghetto for the outcaste, says Sarvajnya.

The world is born out of the unclean
The Brahmin however says “don’t touch me I am clean”
Then where was he born, asks Sarvajnya.

Bones, entrails, nerves, skin, holes, cavities
And fl esh with all kinds of excretion, constitute all beings
Where then is the justifi cation for caste asks Sarvajnya.

We walk on the same earth and drink the same water
We are all burnt by the same fi re, then where does
Caste and gotra come from asks Sarvajnya.

They bring drinking water from the same source and cook
But do not want to sit together and eat
Sarvajnya does not need such people.

The fi ngers count, the tongue multiplies
But if the mind is distracted
Then it is like a street dog says Sarvajnya.

Ganga, Godavari, Tungabhadra and Krishna
You dipped in all of them, but you did not realize the God
within you asks Sarvajnya.

If dipping in holy water the Brahmin jumps straight to
the heaven, then why won't a frog in the same water
Jump up too asks Sarvajnya.

If Sandal wood on the forehead takes you straight to
heaven then why not the stone
On which you make its paste, asks Sarvajnya.

If three holy threads take you to heaven
Then why not someone wearing
An entire rug asks Sarvajnya.

If a thick coat of ashes takes you to the heavens
Then why not a poor
Donkey wallowing in it, asks Sarvajnya.

In a crore of professions agriculture is the highest,
Agriculture leads to textiles too
Else the country itself would be in trouble, says Sarvajnya.

If you tell the truth as you see it they get upset
That is why it is very diffi cult to see people who speak
the truth as they see it, on this earth, says Sarvajnya.

And lastly,

One does not become a Sarvajnya through arrogance
By humbly learning a word from everyone
Sarvajnya became a mountain of knowledge

These are but a few samples. It is difficult to choose from a treasure house of over 2000 of Sarvajnya’s poems where he covers a vast number of topics in everyday life.

It is appropriate that recently the governments of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu commemorated Tiruvalluvar and Sarvajnya through unveiling their statues in each other’s states. However, a more concerted effort should be made to introduce Indians to the rich diversity of cultures and literature from different regions and languages of India.

Reference: Sarvajnya Vachana Sangraha , Selected Vachanas of Sarvajna, Compiled by M.Mariyappa Bhat, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1996

From: Ghadar Jari Hai, Vol III, Issue 3 & 4, July-Dec 2009

Girish Karnad's play: Tipu Sultan

Tipu Sultan’s dreams

Shivanand Kanavi appreciates a play by Girish Karnad

‘Tippuvina Kanasugalu’ (Kannada), Manohar Grantha Mala, Dharwad
Also in English Translation: Two Plays by Girish Karnad - The Dreams of Tipu Sultan/Bali: The Sacrifice, Oxford India Paperbacks, Oxford University Press, 2005

The great warrior king Tipu Sultan, known as the Tiger of Mysore, stood valiantly in the way of wily British colonialism in India. His statecraft was forward looking and was marked not only by burning patriotism but also by administrative efficiency, agricultural development, manufacturing, international and inter-kingdom diplomacy, sericulture, gold mining and refining, pearl culture, toy making, foreign trade, rocketry and development of military technology and manufacturing. However the well known playwright Girish Karnad brings to our notice a little known fact that Tipu was also literally a dreamer. He actually kept a journal where he noted down his nocturnal dreams. Karnad weaves his play around this fact.

It would be great fun to watch a production of the play in appropriate historical surroundings like Delhi’s Purana Kila, but even a reading of the play leads to admiration for the heroic-tragic personality of Tipu as well as the craftsmanship of the playwright.

It is not easy writing historical fiction. There will always be critics looking for historical accuracy. However, if one wanted factual history, one should read a history tome and not fiction. On the other hand there are those who use their characters, historical or otherwise, to mouth the author’s own lemmas and dilemmas. The characters just become cardboard messengers of the author’s ‘message’ and never come alive. If one were to engage in a serious polemic or put forward a thesis then one could write an essay and not dabble in fiction. However we see a large number of authors succumbing to these two extremes. It is only truly good writers who raise their fiction above essays or polemical propaganda. This play proves that Karnad belongs to that select few.

True to the panoramic canvas of nearly twenty years of Tipu’s confrontation with British colonialism, involving three Anglo-Mysore wars, Karnad creates a cornucopia of interesting characters: the serendipitous historian Kirmani; Col Colin Mc-Kenzie who is studying Arthashastra and pushing for a definitive history of Tipu Sultan, typifying Orientalist scholarship when he says “we want to understand our enemy”; the upstart Arthur Wellesley pushed into the limelight by his brother, though he went on later to become famous as the Duke of Wellington after the battle of Waterloo; Richard Wellesley or Lord Mornington, the Governor General, scheming against Cornwallis and pushing his brother Arthur forward with a ‘plum’ position; the ambitious Cornwallis waiting to avenge his humiliation in America; the politically naive Maratha, Haripant, and of course the warrior-dreamer Tipu and his children.

Karnad raises several questions: regarding the clichéd British colonial statecraft of chicanery and divide and rule; the short-sightedness of Maratha tactics; Tipu’s lack of killer instinct and so on, but never imposes his own conclusions. He leaves many tantalizing loose ends so that the reader or the viewer can draw his own. He weaves historical facts regarding Tipu’s progressive statecraft effortlessly into the dialogue.

Many may not know that Karnad’s major as an undergraduate was mathematics. Perhaps as a result one discerns a precision and leanness and balance in his prose. Overall it is an enjoyable play that packs so much in so few pages.

From: Ghadar Jari Hai—The Revolt Continues, Vol III, No. 3&4, July-Dec, 2009

History and Philosophy of Mathematics: C K Raju

Excerpts of this interview appeared in:
Ghadar Jari Hai—The Revolt Continues, Vol III, No. 3&4, July-Dec, 2009

Peepul ke Neeche

“Indian mathematics is practical whereas the European is metaphysical”

C K Raju has been arguing passionately through several lectures and books about the uniqueness of ancient Indian mathematics and how it influenced the rest of the world. He says what is taught as standard modern mathematics today, is based on theological positions taken by the Church after the Crusades. Shivanand Kanavi conversed with Raju on the results of his research in the history and philosophy of mathematics.

Shivanand: Dr Raju welcome to peepul ke neeche conversation. Having looked at some of your writings, I see that you have researched deeply into the mathematical tradition of India as well as that of Persia, Arabia and Europe. Could you give us an overview of exchanges between India and West Asia in the field of mathematics?

Raju: As I have stated in the book (Is Science Western in Origin?—C K Raju), the process of exchange with Arabs started with Barmakids (barmak from pramukh, Persian-Buddhists who were wazirs to Abbasid Khalifas--Ed), this was around 8th century CE, after the conquest of Persia by the Arabs. Besides the spread of Islam in Persia, Persian customs spread to the Arabs. There was a tradition in Persia of importing knowledge from all over the world. It was based on a philosophy which regarded knowledge itself as virtue, like the Socratic philosophy. So, to make people virtuous you gather knowledge from all corners of the world. It was begun by Khusrow Noshirvan in the 6th century. At that time Justinian closed all the schools of philosophy in the Roman empire and many philosophers took refuge in the court of Noshirvan. According to the Shahnama [of Firdausi] his wazir came to India and took chess, Panchatantra etc. back to Persia. There was also an astronomical tradition in Jundishapur (Gundeshapur) in Persia. This astronomy also traveled from India. Which is interesting, because Khusrow’s court already had the most knowledgeable people in the Roman empire and if the Almagest (Almagest is the Latin form of the Arabic name al-kitabu-l-mijisti, (The Great Book) of a mathematical and astronomical treatise proposing the complex motions of the stars and planetary paths, originally written in Greek by Ptolemy of Alexandria, Egypt, written in the 2nd century. The Almagest is the most important source of information on ancient Greek astronomy-Ed) or any other advanced astronomical text existed at that time then it would have been similarly collected and translated, but we do not hear about it. On the contrary, the Almagest itself starts off by addressing an unknown “Cyrus”. So it was probably constructed in Persia. Certainly, Greek knowledge was translated into Persian and later into Arabic. But, so far as astronomy is concerned we know that the very fact that first it went [from India] to Persia and then Baghdad shows that Greek knowledge at that point did not compare in any way with the present-day versions of Ptolemy’s Almagest. There was also a strong tradition of neo-Platonism which came through texts in Greek language [though probably it originated in Egypt]. This was called the “theology of Aristotle”, and that was the primary extent of “Greek” knowledge at that time. There was no Greek knowledge available from Byzantium at that time since all the schools of philosophy there had been closed. [We also know that Arabic knowledge travelled in the other direction, to Greek texts.] The proof is that Panchatantra is translated from Sanskrit to Pahlavi (and you find its reference in Firdausi’s Shahnama) and from Pahlavi it was translated into Arabic and then from Arabic to Greek. Among the Arabs it became the basis of a movement –Ikhwan as- Safa (the Brethren of Purity); so we know the route that knowledge took from India to Greek texts, and it also traveled directly [as in Ashoka’s time when Indian texts and medicinal plants went to Alexandria]. The process really took off with Bayt al hikma (The House of Wisdom at Baghdad) which was linked to Islamic rational theology which valued knowledge as a virtue. It was closely related to aql-i-kalaam, which meant Allah has given you aql and one must apply that aql in order to interpret the Koran.

SK: Which were the sources from which knowledge was gathered in Persia?

Raju: India was one of them. I already talked about Panchatantra, medicine. Indian mathematical texts traveled to Baghdad and they were translated by Al Khwarizmi. [Because of this movement to gather knowledge in Baghdad] the demand for books increased so much that paper technology came in from China into Baghdad. We also hear in some accounts that things came from what are called Greeks [but were from Alexandria in the African continent].

SK: Was there any exchange between Persia and Greece and Persia and India during Alexander’s (Sikander) travel through Persia up to India?

Raju: There is an account in the Zoroastrian book of Nativity that Alexander got his books from the Persian emperor and got them translated. The question is: what happened to them? Presumably, some of them [the looted books] went to Aristotle [Alexander’s teacher] and some of them went to the corpus of the library of Alexandria. Aristotle was supposed to be the first person in Greece to have a library so where did his books come from?

SK: That does not sound very different from Elgin’s marbles!

Raju: (Laughs) Yes. People have not talked about the sources of books for the library of Alexandria. It could not have been those small city states in Greece, which did not have the capacity to produce them. If you look at the trial of Socrates, there were supposed to be 600-odd jurors. If you take ten persons in the population for every citizen then there would still be only about 5-6000 people in Athens so how could they produce the books on the scale of the library of Alexandria—half a million books as is normally mentioned? Only a Persia or an Egypt could have done that.
In the case of Alexander, as with other military conquerors, knowledge flows towards them in the case of barbarian incursions.

SK: Such a large collection of books in those days must have been accumulated over a long time and must have preceded Alexander also.

Raju: Exactly! It must have taken a very, very long time. Papyrus was very expensive [so it also took a lot of resources].

SK: I said this because when I was in Deccan College, Pune, I found that they are putting together a Sanskrit dictionary and after eight volumes they are still in ‘a’since they are adding on contextual meaning as a word occurs in different canonical Sanskrit texts. They have chosen 1500 classical Sanskrit works to do so, which include natya shastra, vastu shastra, ayurveda, literary and philosophical texts and so on. If they are considering 1500 as fairly representative of canonical Sanskrit texts then to have hundreds of thousands of works it must have taken many centuries and many civilisational sources.

Raju: Exactly and that is the how the real corpus of books in the Library of Alexandria accumulated. In fact, how many Greek texts can we count? Nowhere in that neighborhood! There is no possibility that those small [Greek] states could have produced that kind of knowledge. So this entire myth making about Greeks has used this library of Alexandria. Possibly there were some texts in it that came from Greece, but nowhere in the range of half a million.

SK: There must have been Mediterranean exchanges..

Raju: The exchanges between Greece and Egypt were already taking place. Greek people like Plato, Herodotus [routinely] used to come to Egypt for higher studies. Greeks were copying Egyptian gods. Each Greek god has a counterpart in Egypt and in fact Herodotus says that explicitly.

SK: After all Egypt was a much older civilization by a couple of millennia. Did this exchange continue after the Baghdad period also?

Raju: Yes this culture of libraries spread in the entire Islamic world even in Cordoba, Spain during the Islamic period. Al Beruni when he came to India made it a point to collect knowledge of all kinds. The Baghdad book bazaar had become prominent, and this [tradition] persisted [in Islam] at least till the 12th -13th century.

SK: Arabs have been depicted as carriers and safe keepers of knowledge rather than creators of knowledge. Can you comments on that.

Raju: There is an enormous amount of evidence to the contrary. [The book mentions the case of Copernicus, where the Arabs were clearly the creators and the Europeans merely the carriers of knowledge. So] it is good to look at the question: how did this story start? (that Arabs were mere safe keepers of Greek knowledge).

SK: In fact they have been depicted as barbaric nomads killing each other, who did not have any culture till the British formed various nation states in Arabia. Thus there were Pharaohs and then there were Bedouins till the Anglo-Saxons came…

Raju: If you look at Arab literature (pre-Islamic) there is a depiction of a freewheeling society living in the desert. Post Islam, they conquered Persia and absorbed a lot of administrative structure of the Persians and then there was this culture of books and libraries. That itself shows that they had to produce books. It is a different matter that in a bazaar to get a higher price one might say not me but somebody more famous wrote this, or it was written a long time back and make it an antique etc. After all, a lot of things happen in a market. It is undeniable that Arabs were creative and made contributions so one should look at when did the story start that Arabs are only safe keepers. It started during the Crusades. They [the Christians of Europe] were fighting a religious war and Europe had a tradition of book burning. In fact, there were many fiats [by Christian emperors] right from 4th century to burn books. The library of Alexandria was burnt down. There was a tradition of burning heretical books which included secular knowledge. Within Christendom, there was not much of a culture of books and when they were fighting the Arabs they realized that they needed secular knowledge which was available in books. They captured Toledo which had a massive library [coming from] the Umayyad khilafat. It took a lot of time [for the church] to arrive at the decision to translate those books [and not burn them]. This needed a justification. That was concocted by saying that this knowledge belongs to Greece and the Greeks were theologically ‘correct’. This was regarding early Greeks mind you, since they were pre-Christian, whereas they [the church] had conflicts with later Greeks like Proclus, Theon etc. The advantage of inventing a person like Euclid was that you can attribute a philosophy to that individual which suits you.

SK: Is there any Church document or correspondence which discusses these things?

Raju: The church does not operate like that. They are not accessible. Even what the Church did in India is not accessible. If I wish to know what happened in India during the Inquisition then I don’t get access to that even if the records exist. It is not an open archive. I would rather not demand documentary evidence. In this entire [church] tradition, so many documents have been cooked up or forged. After all, even in Delhi, periodically fires go on in so many ministries and documents get burnt (laughs). Let us look at common sense and circumstantial evidence.

SK: What do you consider as Greek contributions, you have raised some questions about their arithmetical capabilities…

Raju: It is clear from their system that it was completely inadequate to do quick sums; forget about subtractions and divisions. I don’t know what their contributions were in science. I don’t have any evidence of that. May be in theatre or other things, however there is strong evidence that some ideas including Platonic ideas come from the mystery geometry tradition of Egypt.

SK: What is mystery geometry?

Raju: I have written a new book on Euclid and the mystery geometry of Egypt. If you see how Plato looks at geometry. He says it should be taught to students in his Republic, which is an ideal state. He has written about how its citizens should be trained—he particularly talks about two subjects viz music and mathematics—in order for their souls to be virtuous. The very word mathematics comes from mathesis, which means learning. What is learning? Socrates demonstrates it by calling a slave boy and asking him questions, thereby showing that the slave boy has an intrinsic knowledge of geometry. He says this is possible because the boy has a soul and the soul is recollecting the knowledge from the previous birth. In fact, the Platonic doctrine is that “all learning is recollection”. Mathematical truths are eternal, and since the soul is eternal, by sympathetic magic they [the eternal truths] arouse the soul. Thus the function of mathematics is to arouse the soul through introspection, by taking you away from the external world. This is the idea of mystery geometry. The practical applications are of no concern to us says Plato, the moral applications are more important.

SK: There are these well known names of Pythagoras and later Archimedes..

Raju: Pythagoras is a school which indulged in mystery mathematics of numbers etc. There is an exoteric part which is told to outsiders and there an esoteric part which is told to initiates. What is the evidence of Pythagoras and the proof of his theorem? [Deductive] proof is a concept post-12th century. At that time [in Pythagoras’ time] it [geometry] was only for arousing the soul. In the mystery tradition the soul knows what truth is and that [intrinsic knowledge of the soul] is the ultimate standard [of truth]. That belief about the soul came into violent conflict with [post-Nicene] Christianity, even though that notion of soul was very much part of early Christianity of Origen. From his notes the present day Bible is derived. He was declared a heretic. The doctrine of love was entirely a mystery tradition. But, after the Church and State came together in the 4th century you could not say that everyone would be saved. There had to be some advantage in becoming a Christian. It is like the state saying I am going to treat my citizens above those of other states. It brings in a boundary: this is ours and that is theirs. That is why Proclus was declared a heretic. Because he said mathematics deals with eternal truths, since the soul is eternal, therefore the cosmos should also be eternal. That goes against the [church] doctrine: for then there will be no creation and no apocalypse, so he was declared a heretic. So was the case of Hypatia and her father Theon (both prominent mathematicians from Alexandria—Ed). Clearly Christianity was uncomfortable with this interpretation of Elements and looked at it as heretical. Then Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) reinterpreted Elements and used it as a weapon against Islam. Basically at that point in time Christendom had realized that it was not possible to spread beyond Spain by force alone. Moreover Europe was still very poor compared to the Arabs and they still coveted that money [the Arabs had]. Even though it [the Crusades] was called a religious war, it was motivated by material concerns. Like the Iraq war, which is not based on moral concerns, but on the oil wealth in the region.
Since it could not be done by warfare the church realized that it also had to adopt the method of argumentation and discourse. Quoting the [Christian] scriptures would not work with the Arabs. Thus, a third ground had to be found. That was found in the neo-Platonism that had already fascinated Islam in the form of aql-i-kalaam or falsafaa. Therefore, Aquinas realized that reason was needed to influence the Arabs. Thus, after Augustine, there was a second period of change in the Christian theological doctrine in the post-Crusade era. It was called Christian rational theology and was an adaptation of Islamic rational theology. This tried to establish universal principles of ‘proof’ [to persuade the Islamic Arabs]. That is where Elements came in.

SK: But did this not create a dichotomy within Christianity, how do you reconcile faith with reason?

Raju: It did indeed. Initially a whole lot of books ascribed to Aristotle, were banned and placed on the Index, since they were thought to be contrary to the doctrines of the Church. But then there was a whole army of people working on it who were trying to reconcile these contradictory beliefs. So it took time for “Aristotle” to be accepted into the [Christian] system. There was a process of absorption via reinterpretation. Thus Elements was reinterpreted from the tradition of mystery geometry to something which gives you a universal ‘proof’.

SK: It is like Vedanta, which says everyone is a part of the Brahman, at the same time it coexisted with the caste system…

Raju: Yes, for example there is this famous story of Shankaracharya and the chandaal, where he prostrates himself in front of the chandaal, but later it is reinterpreted. It is said that chandaal was actually a reincarnation of Shiva etc..

SK: One of the important theses put forward by you is that mathematics has cultural foundations. Can you say that there is an Indian way of doing mathematics if so what are its features?

Raju: There are some clear cut features. In India there was just one notion of proof of praman which was applied everywhere: be it philosophy, mathematics or physics. The first praman was pratyaksh. Empirical means were accepted as proof. This you find in sulbasutras, in Aryabhata, and right down to Yuktibhasha. For example the so called ‘Pythagorean theorem’ could be proved by drawing the triangle on a palm leaf, and it could be shown that the square on the ‘diagonal’ was equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. This could be shown by cutting, rotating etc. Whereas the European tradition would disagree and say that mathematics is purely metaphysical and by bringing in motion you are bringing in physics and it violates the basic idea of geometry as concerned with immovable space. That is one major source of tension. [Secondly], today the notion of proof is seen in a very rigid manner in a completely metaphysical way. How do you carry out deduction? on what logical basis? This is unclear in the Indian tradition. After all there are different systems of logic which are prevalent. There is the Jain system of syadvad and saptabhangi, there is Buddhist logic of chatuskoti and so on. In fact, in the debates between Naiyayikas and Buddhists over a thousand year period you find that they are not addressing each other’s issues because of differing concepts of anumaan [or deduction]. But Europeans declare their logic as universal, when it is not. There is a third aspect which I have called zeroism, which has to do with what is mathematics good for. In the neo-Platonic view it is good for the soul. The European view is that mathematics is good for providing proof. But in India, the aim of mathematics was not to provide praman but to do something vyavaharik, something practical, which is removed from soul etc. If I am doing something vyavaharik, I don’t mind making approximations. If I am computing, then the computer is going to make so many approximations. Many things are discarded or zeroed, and that is acceptable. However European mathematics demands perfection where you cannot discard the smallest entity. The belief in perfection comes from a religious view of mathematics. It then gets into theology that God made the world and he wrote the laws in the language of mathematics [which must hence be perfect]. In India it is calculations.

SK: The word for mathematics in India is ganit that is counting..

Raju: Yes it is numerical calculation. There are proofs and they can be empirical and one particular logic is not considered universal. [So proofs are not the focal concern.]

SK: When pratyaksh praman is not available you bring in inference etc. Clearly mathematics was considered something physical. Can you explain the concept of universalism that is prevalent in mathematics.

Raju: Universality is factually incorrect. The way mathematics was done in India was different from Europe. So the Indian place value system and algorithms or calculus took such a long time to be absorbed by the Europeans. Metaphysics is never universal. The moment mathematical proof becomes metaphysical it ceases to be universal. In fact it can become ‘universal’ only to the extent that it is demonstrable empirically (pratyaksh). Universality is just a European prejudice as they are ill informed about other cultures, so they declare universality from a parochial point of view.

SK: The crude way in which universality is put forward is by saying that 2+2=4, no matter where you are in Greece or Arabia, India or China…

Raju: It is not true, and I have argued it at great length in my paper presented in Hawaii. Let us say we are using a computer to add. 2+2 is a complicated case, so let us take 1+1, The answer could be 1 or even 0 depending on what kind of logic gate one is using. So, I have to specify and say I am using integers. But what are integers? If I do arithmetic with integers on computers say using a C program on a 16 bit machine it will not give 2 as the answer but something else unless I do rounding off. In order to specify what are integers I need infinite time and infinite memory. In a commercial transaction we get into an agreement saying Rs 2 plus Rs 2 would be Rs 4. But that is an agreement. It is not a universal truth. If I have two stones and if I take up two more stones then I get four stones but if I break one of them into two then I get five stone pieces. So I have to be careful about them as universal truths. At a practical level there is no problem. Even if there is no formal agreement or legal frame work, I would simply say you broke the stone. An agreement is not a universal truth or ultimate truth etc.

SK: The statement that numbers are metaphysical transcendental, entities is itself a metaphysical statement.

Raju: That is exactly the point. So long as you are in the domain of convenience it is fine. If you look at Indian texts they will have numbers with 18 digits. What will you do if you need more? you go to 20, 30 or 40 places for a particular purpose. Normally you don’t need more than 18 places. Yajurved goes only till 12 places. Aryabhat goes to 18 places. It is a matter of convenience, but you never go to an infinity of places. That is also how computer arithmetic is done. You round off after some time, and that is perfectly fine but then don’t talk about universal truth.
There is an example given in ethno-mathematics. Suppose I have borrowed two fish from you and I have returned two fish. It won’t do if I have borrowed two big fish and then returned two tiny fish. There is a sense of exchange and fairness involved, not universal truth.

SK: What is the European view on standard of proof etc.

Raju: There is the Platonic deprecation of the empirical. Then there is the clerical elevation of metaphysics over the empirical. The clergy said the metaphysical is a higher truth than the empirical truth. That is fallacious. Metaphysics is decided by a coterie.
What Hilbert did is that he analysed the Elements from this perspective: for example, the proposition 1.4 [of the Elements] or the SAS [Side-Angle-Side] theorem involves physical movement in space, like the Yuktibhasha proof of the “Pythagorean Theorem”. They said the empirical has got into mathematics, which [empirical] is perishable, not eternal, it involves motion hence physics, whereas geometry should be concerned only with properties of immovable space and so on.
So Hilbert said if this theorem is made a postulate then everything becomes metaphysical. Thus he removed the last vestiges of empirical elements in the ‘Elements’. Or at least he thought he did. But actually he could not because he had this notion of congruence which fails after proposition 1.35, the one which is used to derive the area of a triangle. There [in 1.35] congruence is not in the sense of being of the same shape but same area. Earlier propositions are about congruent triangles where you [may] just transfer attention from one shape to the other without moving them. Now [in 1.35] they are incongruent but they are equal in area. The word used in Elements is not “congruent” but “equal”. Equal again is related to equality of the soul as in say Advaita Vedanta which is also a political statement of equality of all people who might look dissimilar. The esoteric meaning is equality of dissimilar things. The way out taken by Hilbert is to define area. But how do you define area without defining length? But if you do define length then the entire Elements becomes trivial as Birkhoff showed with the metric. Thus by throwing out the empirical you start introducing peculiar and artificial things [like defining area without allowing length to be defined] Thus, Hilbert made mathematics completely metaphysical through his ‘axiomatic’ approach.
Now a lot of proofs in mathematics are based on reductio ad absurdum, which depends on two valued logic which would not be acceptable in the Indian tradition at all. So how are these proofs universal?
It is all based on and tightly tied to the [historical] perception that Aristotle the Greek did some logic etc. Of course, one does not even consider that what is called “Aristotelian logic” [might] actually have come from Naiyaikas, through the Arabs. It is a misnomer to call it “Aristotelian”. In my article on Logic for the Springer Encyclopedia of Non-Western Science, Technology, and Medicine, I have made this point that the Aristotelian syllogism is [historically] not to be found anywhere [in Greece]! There is a Stoic syllogism [in Alexandria], but then these things [Aristotelian syllogism] suddenly appear in Toledo and that is problematic.

SK: But syllogism is a very prominent part of Nyaya..

Raju: Yes that is the point, and we also know that Nyaya went to Baghdad. Anyway, the standard approach in mathematics is not universal but has been universalized. First there was the ignorance of Europeans and this ignorance has been universalized through the process of colonization. On the one side [in Americas] people are just killed off, and on the other side they are given Western education where they were given a fabricated history which made them feel inferior. The Indian elite in the 19th century swallowed this and found the solution in aping the west. This has persisted even after independence. My demand is Swaraj in science and in science education.

SK: The creative process is not deductive, otherwise rule-based machines could have done it. But post-facto deduction may be used to teach. However if again our students at the frontiers of research are not going to use the deductive approach then what is the use of even teaching this method?

Raju: Why is mathematics difficult? My answer to that is that math per se is not difficult. But if you look at the text of NCERT for 12th standard, and particularly in Hindi, you find terms like continuity, differentiability, formal real numbers, set theory etc. All this is extremely difficult to follow [in Hindi] even though I have studied all that. It is so terribly convoluted. Where are their primary axioms? They are in set theory, which enables me to axiomatically perform infinite processes, which I cannot ever hope to perform. With the axiom of choice I can have a choice function, I can claim its “existence” etc. It is only through such metaphysical and imaginary infinite processes that one can preserve the perfection of mathematics required by Western theology.
Apart from all these theological principles that have come in, you cannot teach set theory for 10th standard students, so you cannot teach the axiomatic deductive process today. I can do that only at the MSc level and very few people come to that level. The vast majority hence cannot be taught mathematics. You have to tell them a set is a collection of objects! A student has to be taught what is a ring and a field. What utter nonsense! It is very bad pedagogy.

SK: I see a great danger in this. The common perception is that Indians are good in mathematics and good with numbers. That comes from a different tradition than this abstract set theoretic one. By adopting this in our schools we are subverting ourselves!

Raju: That is right and that is the point I have made to the Knowledge Commission. Our culture has some good points and by dropping them we are subverting ourselves.

SK: A very senior executive the chairman of a large bank in Japan told me “We Japanese cannot do software because it is abstract we can do manufacturing very well. We can make things cheaper, faster, smaller etc but not deal with abstractions. Whereas Indian can do it well because they have a philosophic tradition which we lack.” I ventured to say “but you have Zen” and he just brushed it aside.

Raju: That is interesting. I hope it is true. But we are actually adopting counter cultural traditions. There is no discussion of all these things in the public space. I would like to build a quantum computer based on Buddhist logic of chatuskoti, but where is the space to discuss this?
We need to discuss what we need to teach. Somebody just sits behind closed doors and decides what should be taught and that is not correct. There is no reason. Just that we should continue to ape the west. This is how things are made ‘universal’ by a class which is educated in the western tradition and are treated as experts. If experts cannot engage in critical thinking then how do you expect the students to do it?
It is not possible to do computer arithmetic without discarding some part of a number. As soon as we start looking at what a floating point number is, we find that it is not part of a ring or a field or anything! The basic so called associative law is not obeyed. By the way, whose law? why “law”? These are all theological concepts, that the numbers must obey the law etc. All the standard algebraic structures are useless [for computer arithmetic].
In reality, there is a practical way of doing things which is embodied in the way these data types like floating point numbers are used, which is different from theoretical computer science. This encompasses a different philosophy which is closer to what I am talking about. I am talking about practical computation, where we can discard these things. But on what logic? not based on perfection or universalism! You tell me how many decimal places you need and I can procure them. That is where shoonyavad or zeroism comes in. Based on this zeroism I am conducting a course on “Calculus without Limits” in Central University of Tibetan Studies in Sarnath. I am demonstrating it to show how much simpler life can be without universalism or set theory etc.
If we say we are a secular state why should we bring in theology in mathematics, after all if I use Buddhist logic many of the theorems in mathematics will fail! We should teach secular and practical mathematics. We are doing it because the universities in the west are doing it. But those universities were erected for theological purposes. According to [Isaac] Barrow, Cambridge University was established to breed clerics!

SK: I think seeing the pragmatism embedded in western societies today I think if you build a quantum computer using Buddhist logic that can threaten the encryption involved US financial system then you would have proved your point and billions of dollars will be spent on research on alternative logic.

Raju: That is accepted. We do need to find applications, but for me the very fact that people will be able to understand much of mathematics using this new system itself would be a worth it. I don’t care if the west wants to do it or not. My son should be able to do calculations easily which he could not do earlier.

SK: I will give an example to illustrate what I was saying. Fuzzy Logic was invented by Lotfi Zadeh, a Iranian professor at University of Berkeley. There were people who called it cocaine of mathematics implying that he was high on drugs and invented this since it did not follow the normal Aristotelian binary logic. The Japanese picked it up and used it in all appliances like washing machines, TV etc. The Americans picked it up only in the 80s because they had launched an armed commando raid on Tehran in 78-79 during the hostage crisis. But the control systems of their military helicopters carrying the commandos could not stand the heat and dust of the desert. They crashed and the mission was a failure. Then they realized they needed fuzzy logic based adaptive control systems and they brought them in. In that sense they are not theological.

Raju: My concern is not to convert the west. My concern is if these theological concepts have crept into mathematics then that mathematics should NOT be taught in this country. We should teach secular mathematics. After all it is being used to condition people, inculcate inferiority in them through fake history etc.

SK: It is definitely driving people away from mathematics.

Raju: And these kids keep looking at pictures of a fake Euclid and a fake Pythagoras as white Caucasians which we see in text books, and grow up in awe of the west and say the solution to any problem is to ape the west. If we can break out of those things that itself would be an achievement.

SK: One last comment. Many have objections to the way the Indian mathematical results are written in the form of a sutra without explaining how they arrived at it or what is the justification for it. Is there any insight into how they achieved these results? Secondly, one person who wrote many results filling up many note books without giving proof is Srinivasan Ramanujan though it was in the field of analysis in the western tradition.

Raju: I am not arguing for an absence of process. To deny the value of deductive proof is one thing, and to say that there should be complete absence of process is another thing. I would assert that though there was the sutra tradition there were also Yuktibhasa, Yukti Deepika etc where they explain the process, perhaps due to Jesuit pressure! They were written after the arrival of Europeans in Cochin. A sutra has to be terse to make it easy to remember. It is a cultural matter [in the oral tradition] that here we are dealing with minds of human beings and hence the communication should be from one mind to another and not filtered through a derivation on a dead parchment where it is liable to be misunderstood. Right or wrong that seemed to have been the cultural tradition and an oral tradition. After all even Vedas are not written down. That is not a critical issue dealing with validity but a pedagogical matter.
Certainly a process has to be there and a justification [praman] has to be there. In my book [Cultural Foundations of Mathematics] I have shown [in Chapter 3] that there is complete praman for the infinite series in India, but the derivation is on different philosophical principles. I don’t say that first I should have set theory which allows me to do some infinite processes and then I should have an infinite set of numbers and then prove convergence and so on. That is the rigmarole of Western mathematics.
I want to sum the series and the stated criterion is that the sum should remain constant when I add two consecutive terms. How does it remain constant? Up to the level of accuracy and the decimal (or sexagesimal) places I need. This is similar to epsilon-delta [and the “Cauchy” criterion] but deals with a finite number of terms [and does not involve a infinite metaphysical process]. That is a perfectly good criterion.

SK: That is what physicists do when they sum any series like Raleigh-Schroedinger perturbation series. You calculate to the second order of approximation and if there is serious problem you go to the next order.

Raju: That is how all computer algorithms are done. It only ceases to be valid if you demand perfection! That is a perfectly practical attitude. It is not that process and proof are missing. It is just proof from a different philosophical position.
The first text book on philosophy that I picked up from my father said, there is no philosophical tradition in India but only poetry! For philosophy you have to read the Greeks! So now I can say that there is no mathematical tradition in Europe and it is all theology which was imported here through colonialism!
What happened with Elements is that it had come to India through Islam but it was not translated into Sanskrit till very late at the time of Sawai Jai Singh in 1723, long after the arrival of Jesuits in Jehangir’s court. There were two parallel distinct traditions. Akbar’s courtier (Abul Fazl) who wrote the Ain-e-Akbari talks about learning from the Elements. It was there in Arabic and Persian traditions but was not considered valuable by Indian mathematicians. It was considered something religious. Also, practically Pythagoras theorem comes at the end of the Elements where as Yuktibhasa starts with it, with a different way of proving it without the forty odd earlier results.
So I would say it is a religious belief which is being universalized and I find it highly objectionable. I would say, in fact, our principles are universal since they are empirical and physical. I would characterize present-day mathematics as European ethno-mathematics tainted by theology.