history of Integrated Circuit

By 1958 the transistor was in wide use, however it didn't take long for the limits of the transistor to be met and soon manufacturers were looking for something even more compact and efficient to use in newer electronics.

In 1958 and 1959, Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Camera, came up with a solution to the problem of large numbers of components, and the integrated circuit was developed.

Instead of making transistors one-by-one, several transistors could be made at the same time, on the same piece of semiconductor. Not only transistors, but other electric components such as resistors, capacitors and diodes could be made by the same process with the same materials.

Originally it was thought that integrated circuits would be useful only in military applications, and many microprocessor investors pulled out before the work was completed. However time has proven the integrated circuit to be greatly undervalued.

Jack Kilby's Chip - the Monolithic Idea

Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 – June 20, 2005) was an American electrical engineer who took part (along with Robert Noyce) in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958.

In mid-1958, Kilby was a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments who did not yet have the right to a summer vacation. He spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design that was commonly called the "tyranny of numbers" and finally came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12 he presented his findings to the management, which included Mark Shepherd: he showed them a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached, pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave, proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he solved the problem. U.S. Patent 3,138,743 for "Miniaturized Electronic Circuits", the first integrated circuit, was filed on February 6, 1959. Along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later), Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit.

Robert Noyce

Robert Noyce came up with his own idea for the integrated circuit. He did it half a year later than Jack Kilby. Noyce's circuit solved several practical problems that Kilby's circuit had, mainly the problem of interconnecting all the components on the chip. This was done by adding the metal as a final layer and then removing some of it so that the wires needed to connect the components were formed. This made the integrated circuit more suitable for mass production. Besides being one of the early pioneers of the integrated circuit, Robert Noyce also was one of the co-founders of Intel. Intel is one of the largest manufacturers of integrated circuits in the world.

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