1952 AD to 1970 AD |
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| Individually packaged transistors were much smaller than their vacuum tube predecessors, but designers desired still smaller electronic switches. To a large extent the demand for miniaturization was driven by the demands of the American space program. For some time people had been thinking that it would be a good idea to be able to fabricate entire circuits on a single piece of semiconductor. | ||
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| The first public discussion of this idea is credited to a British radar expert, G.W.A. Dummer, in a paper presented in 1952. However, it was not until the summer of 1958, that Jack Kilby, working for Texas Instruments, succeeded in fabricating multiple components on a single piece of semiconductor. Kilby's first prototype was a phase shift oscillator and, although manufacturing techniques subsequently took different paths to those used by Kilby, he is still credited with the creation of the first true integrated circuit. | By 1961, Fairchild and Texas Instruments had announced the availability of the first commercial planar integrated circuits comprising simple logic functions. This announcement marked the beginning of the mass production of integrated circuits. In 1963, Fairchild produced a device called the 907 containing two logic gates, each of which consisted of four bipolar transistors and four resistors. The 907 also made use of isolation layers and buried layers, both of which were to become common features in modern integrated circuits. | |
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| In 1967, Fairchild introduced a device called the Micromosaic, which contained a few hundred transistors. The key feature of the Micromosaic was that the transistors were not initially connected to each other. A designer used a computer program to specify the function the device was required to perform, and the program determined the necessary transistor interconnections and constructed the photo-masks required to complete the device. The Micromosaic is credited as the forerunner of the modern application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), and also as the first real application of computer aided design. | ||
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| In 1970, Fairchild introduced the first 256-bit static RAM called the 4100, while Intel announced the first 1024-bit dynamic RAM, called the 1103, in the same year. | ||
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| These notes are abstracted from the book Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) Copyright Information |
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