Brief history of integrated circuits

The first functional integrated circuit was demonstrated and patented by J. Kilby from Texas Instruments in 1959. It consisted of a sliced crystal germanium containing a bipolar transistor, a capacitor and three resistors. It demonstrated how several components could be integrated on the same semiconductor, but did not show any satisfactory method of connecting the components; this being achieved by hand using thin gold wires.

The invention of the integrated circuit was motivated by the time consuming, expensive, and at that time, notoriously unreliable hand-soldering process of connecting hundreds or thousands of discrete elements.

Integrated circuit is a miniaturized electronic comprised of a single transistor and other integrated components fabricated on semiconductor material.

The planar process initially developed by J. Hoerni and R. Noyce in 1959 as an improved method of manufacturing discrete silicon transistor, combined the existing diffusion and masking techniques with a method of connection.

Noyce’s circuit solved several practical problems that Kilby’s circuit had, mainly the problem of interconnecting all the components on the chip.

One of the first commercially available planar integrated circuits was a flip-flop containing four transistor and five resistors. It was one of a family of resistor transistor logic chips offer by Fairchild in 1961.

In 1964 the first linear integrated circuit was developed by R. Wildar, an operational amplifier which contained twelve transistor and five resistors. It was remarkable not only for being the first operational amplifier on a single chip, but also for the ingenuity of the design.

By the time the techniques of integrated circuit manufacture were maturing, and the pace of integration measured in terms of increased transistor count, greater manufacturing yield and reduced cost was marked.

Today, hundreds of millions of integrated circuits are sold annually and the integrated circuit semiconductor industries a major contributor to the world economy.
Brief history of integrated circuits