The Integrated Circuit

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 344.

Limits of Individual Transistors

Individual electronic components were soldered on to printed circuit boards.

For many years, transistors were made as individual electronic components and were connected to other electronic components (resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, etc.) on boards to make an electronic circuit. They were much smaller than vacuum tubes and consumed much less power. Electronic circuits could be made more complex, with more transistors switching faster than tubes.

However, it did not take long before the limits of this circuit construction technique were reached. Circuits based on individual transistors became too large and too difficult to assemble. There were simply too many electronic components to deal with. The transistor circuits were faster than vacuum tube circuits, and there were noticeable problems due to time delays for electric signals to propagate a long distance in these large circuits. To make the circuits even faster, one needed to pack the transistors closer and closer together.

Integrated circuits placed all components in one chip, drastically reducing the size of the circuit and its components.

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.

For more than 30 years, since the 1960's, the number of transistors per unit area has been doubling every 1.5 years. This fantastic progression of circuit fabrication is known as Moore's law, after Gordon Moore, one of the early integrated circuit pioneers and founders of Intel Corporation. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2000 was awarded to Jack Kilby for the invention of the integrated circuit.

From the dawn of the vacuum tube triode, to the discovery of the transistor and the development of the integrated circuit, the 20th century has certainly been the century of electronics.