Consumer Semi Girl Gets to Explain Herself

I had an interesting experience at a bridal shower the other day.  I met someone absolutely fascinated with my career, but with little knowledge of semiconductors (ingorance being bliss here, perhaps).  I generally meet two kinds of people:  those who know all about semiconductors and are appreciably more knowledgeable than I am, at least about the specific product their company makes, and people who think semiconductors are really, really boring.

So lo and behold, I had myself a unique situation at the shower.  Quickly guessing that a long conversation about gates, substrates, electrons in motion and so on would be of no real interest, I had to discuss what a semiconductor really does, what it enables.  Opening up my purse, I pulled out a USB flash drive, a digital camera, and of course, a cell phone.  I explained to my audience that all these common devices are in fact just semiconductors with some plastic, metal, and branding wrapped around them, and some software, too.  The key point however is that semiconductors ARE the device.  A DVD player, for example, is more or less one chip with a whole lot of empty box around it.  While I talk about semiconductors all darn day, and while I really believe my postulation that the consumer device story is really a semiconductor story, I found out just how hard it is to convey this to the average person with passing interest.