|
This is the age of electronics – an age not possible in the era of the vacuum tube. The integrated circuit (IC) has revolutionized our lives in so many ways. This era began at Bell Labs when William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain invented the transistor in 1947, creating a small-size, low-power, and higher-speed device. If the transistor ushered in the electronic age, the integrated circuit brought it to a new level.
Clearly, this is the age of electronics – an age not possible in the era of the vacuum tube. The integrated circuit (IC) has revolutionized our lives in so many ways. From our desktop, laptop, and super computers, information is at our fingertips through the Internet. We have iPods to listen to our favorite music while we are on the move. PDAs provide instant e-mail, GPS, digital cameras, all in one unit while we are on the go. ICs have enabled digital television, game consoles, and automotive safety electronics, as well as pacemakers and bionic limbs. Chips are everywhere – including our passports, bank cards, microwaves, as well as calculators and digital watches.
This revolution began at Bell Labs when William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain invented the transistor in 1947, creating a small-size, low-power, and higher-speed device. This device would replace the cumbersome vacuum tubes that were unreliable because they consumed many kilowatts (kWs) of energy, created a large amount of heat, and frequently burned out.
As modern history has shown, the transistor was more than just a replacement for the vacuum tube. Bob Wallace of Bell Labs said, “The significance of the transistor is not that it can replace the tube, but that it can do things that the vacuum tube could never do.” If the transistor ushered in the electronic age, the integrated circuit brought it to a new level.
Shockley left Bell Labs in 1955, heading to Palo Alto to form Shockley Semiconductors. There, he assembled a strong group of bright young scientists and engineers, including Robert Noyce. While the first transistor was based on germanium, Shockley believed that silicon was a better choice. In 1957, Noyce and seven others left Shockley Semiconductors to form a new company, Fairchild Semiconductors.
In the summer of 1958, Jack Kilby was hired by Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) to work on microminiaturization. During a plant shutdown, he pondered the idea of electrically connecting resistors, capacitors, and transistors together to form a circuit. On September 12, 1958, he built a phase shift oscillator by using gold wires to connect germanium transistors with resistors and capacitors etched on the same substrate – creating the first “solid circuit.” The new technology was announced in March 1959.
TI launched “Kilby Labs” on September 12 this year, the 50th anniversary of Kilby’s “solid circuit” breakthrough. Kilby Labs is located on TI’s Dallas North Campus and is inspired by the original TI lab where Kilby worked.
At the same time in the 1950s, at Fairchild Semiconductors, Robert Noyce, director of research, was contemplating the same problem as Jack Kilby, but his ultimate design was more manufacturable. Noyce made the metal interconnects an integral part of the device. Both companies filed patents, and eventually cross-licensed each firm’s technology.
Kilby and Noyce were both credited with the invention of the integrated circuit, each contributing to different aspects of the invention. Noyce, who went on to co-found Intel, died in 1991. In 2000, Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his electronics invention.
The microprocessor came on the scene in the early 1970s and used integrated circuit technology to create the microchip that now powers computers and workstations. This was the next revolutionary development in the age of silicon.
Chip complexity is measured by the number of transistors, which grows exponentially for integrated circuits, according to Moore’s Law. The first Intel processor in 1971 had 2,300 transistors; Pentium 1 in 1993 had 3.1 million; the company’s recently announced Tukwila has 2 billion transistors.
At one time, the Santa Clara valley in northern California was filled with orchards of plums, pears, apricots, and cherries. Today, it is the heart of Silicon Valley – a term popularized in 1971 by Don Hoefler in a weekly trade journal, Electronic News. Here reside many entrepreneurs who dream dreams of electronic innovations and find ways to make them happen.
The integrated circuit has had a significant impact on our lives and our world. As technology continues to evolve, let’s take a moment to thank Kilby, Noyce, and all of the other predecessors whose work we build on, for their brilliant inventiveness. I paraphrase that certain physicist and inventor who, years before the electronics era, said that we stand on the shoulders of giants as we move into the future. SMT
Laura J. Turbini, Ph.D., is an SMT Advisory Board Member, an adjunct faculty member at the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo, and Chemistry Lab Manager and Principal Scientist at Research in Motion. She also serves on the Board of Directors at the SMTA. Contact her at (519) 888-7465, ext. 77744; lturbini@rim.com.
SMT November, 2008
Author(s) :
Laura J. Turbini
|
Current Issue 
Add RSS Feed
