Researched
Integrated Circuit
Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce put many transistors on one piece of semiconductor: the start of the chip industry.
Open in the interactive tree →Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) demonstrated the first integrated circuit in September 1958; Robert Noyce (Fairchild) developed the practical planar silicon version with deposited metal traces in 1959. Instead of soldering individual parts, whole circuits are exposed onto a wafer by photolithography. This made electronics smaller, cheaper and more reliable at once; Kilby received the Nobel Prize for it in 2000.
Prerequisites
- Photography1839Chip patterns are printed by photographic exposure of a photoresist
- Transistor1947
- Ultrapure Silicon & Chips1954Noyce's planar chip needed ultrapure silicon
- Photolithography for Chips1955Printing circuit patterns with light masks is how ICs are made
- Planar Process1959Noyce's monolithic IC was built with the planar process
Unlocks
- Apollo Guidance Computer1961-1969
- Moore's Law1965
- DRAM main memory1966
- Mouse and graphical interface1968
- CCD image sensor1969
- Moon landing1969
- Microprocessor1971
- RFID Tags1973
- Barcode & Scanner1974
- Space Shuttle1981
- Flash memory1984
- Large-scale neural recording1990–2017Dense neural probes (e.g. Neuropixels) put recording circuits on the chip itself
- Deep Blue Beats Kasparov1997
- Graphics Processor (GPU)1999
- Solar Boom & Price Collapse2015–2026
- Cryo-EM Resolution Revolution2017Direct electron detectors, a key trigger of the cryo-EM revolution, are CMOS chips
- EUV Lithography2019
- First Quantum Processors2019
- James Webb Space Telescope2021
- Rubin and Roman sky surveys2026