Integrated Circuit

The microchip · 1958

A monolithic block of doped silicon photolithographed into millions to billions of transistors, resistors and interconnect layers. Jack Kilby (TI) and Robert Noyce (Fairchild) independently solved the tyranny of numbers in 1958–59 — every modern processor, memory and microcontroller is a direct descendant. Moore’s law has driven feature size from ~10 µm to ~2 nm in six decades.

Key specifications