RABBIT HOLE 2 – A lot of you know a town named after the rock that every computer chip is made of.
Stay with me.
Rocklin = “The Granite City.” Literally named for the rock. 62 quarries once ran there; the granite built the State Capitol, the Transamerica Pyramid, half of old San Francisco.
Granite is packed with quartz. Quartz is silica. And silica is where you get silicon — the element at the heart of every microchip on Earth. The same silicon my book is named after.
So the raw material of the entire digital age? It’s the rock Rocklin is named after.
And here’s the part that got me: you don’t even have to leave the area to find the finished chips. A few miles down the road in Roseville, the same fab has been making semiconductors since 1984 — NEC, then Renesas, then TSI, now Bosch, retooling right now to crank out silicon chips for electric cars.
Rock to chip. Same element, start to finish, all within a few exits.
Which is the exact rabbit hole I fell down writing Silicon Smuggling
