Invention of the integrated circuit

The first planar monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip was demonstrated in 1960. The idea of integrating electronic circuits into a single device was born when the German physicist and engineer Werner Jacobi developed and patented the first known integrated transistor amplifier in 1949 and the British radio engineer Geoffrey Dummer proposed to integrate a variety of standard electronic components in a monolithic semiconductor crystal in 1952. A year later, Harwick Johnson filed a patent for a prototype IC. Between 1953 and 1957, Sidney Darlington and Yasuo Tarui (Electrotechnical Laboratory) proposed similar chip designs where several transistors could share a common active area, but there was no electrical isolation to separate them from each other. These ideas could not be implemented by the industry, until a breakthrough came in late 1958. Three people from three U.S. companies solved three fundamental problems that hindered the production of integrated circuits. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments patented the principle of integration, created the first prototype ICs and commercialized them. Kilby's invention was a hybrid integrated circuit (hybrid IC), rather than a monolithic integrated circuit (monolithic IC) chip. Between late 1958 and early 1959, Kurt Lehovec of Sprague Electric Company developed a way to electrically isolate components on a semiconductor crystal, using p–n junction isolation. The first monolithic IC chip was invented by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor. He invented a way to connect the IC components (aluminium metallization) and proposed an improved version of insulation based on the planar process technology developed by Jean Hoerni. On September 27, 1960, using the ideas of Noyce and Hoerni, a group of Jay Last's at Fairchild Semiconductor created the first operational semiconductor IC. Texas Instruments, which held the patent for Kilby's invention, started a patent war, which was settled in 1966 by the agreement on cross-licensing. There is no consensus on who invented the IC. The American press of the 1960s named four people: Kilby, Lehovec, Noyce and Hoerni; in the 1970s the list was shortened to Kilby and Noyce. Kilby was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit". In the 2000s, historians Leslie Berlin, Bo Lojek and Arjun Saxena reinstated the idea of multiple IC inventors and revised the contribution of Kilby. Modern IC chips are based on Noyce's monolithic IC, rather than Kilby's hybrid IC.

Prerequisites

Waiting for a breakthrough

During and immediately after World War II a phenomenon named "the tyranny of numbers" was noticed, that is, some computational devices reached a level of complexity at which the losses from failures and downtime exceeded the expected benefits. Each Boeing B-29 (put into service in 1944) carried 300–1000 vacuum tubes and tens of thousands of passive components. The number of vacuum tubes reached thousands in advanced computers and more than 17,000 in the ENIAC (1946). Each additional component reduced the reliability of a device and lengthened the troubleshooting time. Traditional electronics reached a deadlock and a further development of electronic devices required reducing the number of their components. The invention of the first transistor in 1947 led to the expectation of a new technological revolution. Fiction writers and journalists heralded the imminent appearance of "intelligent machines" and robotization of all aspects of life. Although transistors did reduce the size and power consumption, they could not solve the problem of reliability of complex electronic devices. On the contrary, dense packing of components in small devices hindered their repair. While the reliability of discrete components was brought to the theoretical limit in the 1950s, there was no improvement in the connections between the components.

Idea of integration Early developments of the integrated circuit go back to 1949, when the German engineer Werner Jacobi (Siemens AG) filed a patent for an integrated-circuit-like semiconductor amplifying device showing five transistors on a common substrate in a 3-stage amplifier arrangement with two transistors working "upside-down" as impedance converter. Jacobi disclosed small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent. An immediate commercial use of his patent has not been reported. On May 7, 1952, the British radio engineer Geoffrey Dummer formulated the idea of integration in a public speech in Washington:

With the advent of the transistor and the work in semiconductors generally, it seems now to be possible to envisage electronic equipment in a solid block with no connecting wires. The block may consist of layers of insulating, conducting, rectifying and amplifying materials, the electrical functions being connected by cutting out areas of the various layers.

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