American productivity still leads the world

CLAD IN a white bunny suit that leaves only his eyes exposed, S.V. Sreenivasan carefully picks up the slender object that lies at the heart of the global economy, a silicon wafer. But this particular wafer is a little different from most of those from which semiconductors are made: it is fused to a glass plate. Mr Sreenivasan’s team at the Texas Institute for Electronics, a public-private consortium, is working on a $1.4bn research project to make chips which use materials in addition to silicon and which stack components vertically. If successful, it could change the basic architecture of semiconductors. “People keep asking if innovation in the industry will slow down,” Mr Sreenivasan says. “If anything, it’s accelerating.”