BUILDING ON THE PAST, READY FOR THE FUTURE: - MEMC

10
The first integrated circuit. Both men are credited with the invention of “the
chip,” the monolithic (meaning formed from a
single crystal) integrated circuit. While Jack Kilby
1959 One wafer, one chip.
1969 A dime-sized area of silicon held
almost 10,000 transistors.
1985 A dime-sized area of silicon held
several hundred thousand
transistors.
1990s Millions of transistors resided on
a silicon chip.
2001 Circuitry on silicon can be
shrunk to 0.13 microns—1/800th
the width of a human hair—and
the fastest chips operate at more
than two billion calculations per
second!
successfully used germanium as the semiconductor
in his model, it was Robert Noyce’s silicon version,
and the fabrication techniques he devised, that
made the integrated circuit practical. Both Texas
Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor filed for
patents in 1959, and a legal battle ensued that lasted
for over a decade. Patent No. 3,138,743 was issued to
Jack Kilby and Texas Instruments for miniaturized
electronic circuits in 1964. Patent No. 2,981,877
was granted to Robert Noyce for the silicon-based
integrated circuit. Eventually, Texas Instruments
and Fairchild Semiconductor agreed to cross-license
their technologies. Integrated circuits (ICs) gave
device manufacturers the ability to integrate large