![]() In 2000, Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics ‘for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit’. Both Kilby and Noyce shared the patent right for the invention of the integrated circuit. The interconnection in Noyce’s 4‐inch silicon wafer was realized by means of etching the aluminium film which was first deposited onto a layer of oxide. Robert Norton Noyce from Fairchild Camera (also one of the co‐founders of Intel Corporation) invented independently his own integrated circuit chip. The device was just a simple 0.5‐inch germanium bar, with a transistor, a capacitor and three resistors connected together using fine platinum wires. Clair Kilby who was then an engineer in Texas Instruments successfully developed the first integrated circuit. ![]() It was also in the same year the planar transistor was proposed by Dr. To reduce the resistivity of the collector, the transistor with an epitaxial layer added onto it was developed in 1960. In 1955, the first diffused silicon transistor made its appearance. Since silicon gives much better performance than germanium transistors, the substrate material for transistors was gradually changed to silicon. The first commercially available silicon transistors were manufactured by Dr. Although the device had initially been referred to as the ‘semiconductor triode’, the word ‘transistor’ (which originates from the abbreviated combinations of the words ‘transconductance’ and ‘varistor’) had ultimately turned out to be the winner of the internal poll. According to the ‘Memorandum For File’ of Bell Telephone Laboratories, six names had been proposed for the device, namely ‘semiconductor triode’, ‘surface states triode’, ‘crystal triode’, ‘solid triode’, ‘iotatron’ and ‘transistor’. ![]() Instead, it was generally referred to as the ‘semiconductor triode’. It may be worth noting that when this germanium solid‐state device was initially introduced, it was not coined the term ‘transistor’. Because of this significant contribution, Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. The rapid widespread usage of the semiconductor transistors in electronic circuits has triggered a dramatic revolution in the electronic industries, kicking off the era of semiconductor. It was these advantages and its viability that resulted in the replacement of vacuum tubes by the solid‐state electronic devices. To provide readers with an overall view of VLSI, this chapter gives a concise but complete illustration on the historical evolution, design and development of VLSI‐integrated circuit devices.Īn early model of the point‐contact transistor.īeing much smaller in size, consuming much lower power, operating at relatively lower temperature and giving quicker response time, the semiconductor transistor is clearly more superior to its conventional vacuum tubes brethren. There is little doubt that the electronics world has experienced a significant advancement for the past 50 years or so and this, to a large extent, is due to the rapid technology improvement in the performance, power, area, cost and ‘time to market’ of an integrated circuit (IC) chip. ![]() Nowadays, the number of transistors in a very large‐scale integration (VLSI) chip may possibly reach 10 billion, with a feature size smaller than 15 nm. Fabricated based on the 6.0‐μm feature size, the 6800 consisted of merely 4100 transistors in it. Take, for example, the once popular Motorola 6800 microprocessor developed in the mid 1970s. Back in the old days about 40 years ago, the number of transistors found in a chip was, even at its highest count, less than 10,000. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |