Dallas, Texas and Mountain View, California, United States
Associated with
Jack Kilby
Engineer at Texas Instruments; Nobel Prize in Physics 2000
Robert Noyce
Co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel
Jean Hoerni
Invented the planar process
Plate 086
1958–1959
Dallas, Texas and Mountain View, California, United States
No photograph is shown for this exhibition. The museum displays an image only where it can show the object honestly.
About this date
Jack Kilby demonstrated an integrated circuit at Texas Instruments on 12 September 1958. Robert Noyce developed a silicon planar version at Fairchild in 1959.
About credit
Kilby and Noyce developed it independently; courts and companies eventually shared credit. Noyce died in 1990 and so was not eligible for the Nobel Prize.
Chapter II
The world before
Life before the Integrated Circuit
Circuits were assembled by hand, wiring thousands of components, which limited complexity and reliability.
II
The human achievement
How it came about
Kilby built a working circuit on a piece of germanium with wires linking parts. Noyce’s planar silicon design laid metal lines on the chip itself, allowing mass production. In 1965 Gordon Moore observed that the number of components on a chip doubled about every year, later revised to every two years.
III
Understanding the invention
How it works
The Integrated Circuit, explained in two steps.
01
Step 01 of 02
Print the circuit
Light and chemicals pattern layers on a silicon wafer, like printing.
Print the circuit
Scale
IV
The transformation
What changed for humanity
Computing
From mainframes to personal computers and phones.
Economy
The semiconductor industry became central to global trade.
Chips made electronics small, cheap and reliable, and made the modern digital world possible.
V
Before and after
Life before and after The Integrated Circuit
Before
Hand-wired boards.
After
One chip.
On larger screens, drag the divider (or use the arrow keys) to give more room to the world before or after.
