What is an Integrated Circuit?

The semiconductor device electronics technology that drives all the devices in our factories, cars, homes, and pockets dates from the early Fifties, when the first bipolar transistors entered production. Transistors were fundamental structure blocks for sense circuits and computers because they could be used as binary devices that could be switched ON and OFF. They were equally useful in analog circuits similar as audio equipment or data acquisition systems because of their modification capabilities.

The first electronic designs comprised transistors and other separate components, including diodes, capacitors, resistors, and inductors, assembled onto a PCB which could give electrical connections between the components as well acting as a mounting base. Simple circuits could be connected to achieve larger and more complex functions – but as complexity increased, so did cost, size, temperature, trustability issues and manufacturing challenges. This problem, occasionally known as ‘ the tyranny of figures ’, came a technological barrier preventing the full potential of semiconductor technology being applied to more important and functional yet lower devices. To move forward, there had to be a better way of structure and connecting transistors in large quantities.

In the mid Fifties, when the world – and the service in particular – had realized the amazing potential of electronic computers, numerous scientists and engineers were looking for results that would not only work technically but could be produced profitably on a commercial scale. Against this background, the integrated circuit was the solution waiting to be invented.

Although there's no agreement on who made the integrated circuit a practical reality, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor are widely credited as two major developers of the technologies needed.

Kilby was working at Texas Instruments when he developed the idea he called the monolithic principle trying to make all the different parts of an electronic circuit on a silicon chip. On September 12, 1958, he hand- built the world's first, crude integrated circuit using a chip of germanium( a semiconducting element similar to silicon) and Texas Instruments applied for a patent on the idea the following time.

Meanwhile, at another company called Fairchild Semiconductor( formed by a small group of associates who had firstly worked for the transistor pioneer William Shockley) the equally brilliant Robert Noyce was experimenting with miniature circuits of his own. In 1959, he used a series of photographic and chemical techniques known as the planar process (which had just been developed by a coworker, Jean Hoerni) to produce the first, practical, integrated circuit, a system that Fairchild also tried to patent. There was considerable overlap between the two men's work and Texas Instruments and Fairchild battled in the courts for important of the 1960s over who had really developed the integrated circuit. Eventually, in 1969, the companies agreed to share the idea.