The Silicon Eye Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech Innovation [Paperback]

Thanks to the digital technology revolution, cameras are everywherePDAs, phones, anywhere you can put an imaging chip and a lens. Battling to usurp this two-billion-dollar market is a Silicon Valley company, Foveon, whose technology not only produces a superior image but also may become the eye in artificially intelligent machines. Behind Foveon are two legendary figures who made the personal computer possible: Carver Mead of Caltech, one of the founding fathers of information technology, and Federico Faggin, inventor of the CPUthe chip that runs every computer.Like Foveons founders, Mr. Gilder wants to understand vision, albeit of a different kind: the vision of innovators. . . . The unpredictable disorder of markets is, in Microsoft parlance, not a bug but a feature. Thats a lesson that Mr. Gilders book drives home.Proof that the spell of the Valley, after decades of booms and busts, is alive and well.Technology insider George Gilder delivers a compelling (