Code_ The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software - Charles Petzold [93]
A working product, however, would have to wait a few years.
Without knowing about the Dummer prediction, in July 1958 it occurred to Jack Kilby (born 1923) of Texas Instruments that multiple transistors as well as resistors and other electrical components could be made from a single piece of silicon. Six months later, in January 1959, basically the same idea occurred to Robert Noyce (1927–1990). Noyce had originally worked for Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories, but in 1957 he and seven other scientists had left and started Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation.
In the history of technology, simultaneous invention is more common than one might suspect. Although Kilby had invented the device six months before Noyce, and Texas Instruments had applied for a patent before Fairchild, Noyce was issued a patent first. Legal battles ensued, and only after a decade were they finally settled to everyone's satisfaction. Although they never worked together, Kilby and Noyce are today regarded as the coinventors of the integrated circuit, or IC, commonly called the chip.
Integrated circuits are manufactured through a complex process that involves layering thin wafers of silicon that are precisely doped and etched in different areas to form microscopic components. Although it's expensive to develop a new integrated circuit, they benefit from mass production—the more you make, the cheaper they become.
The actual silicon chip is thin and delicate, so it must be securely packaged, both to protect the chip and to provide some way for the components in the chip to be connected to other chips. Integrated circuits are packaged in a couple of different ways, but the most common is the rectangular plastic dual inline package (or DIP), with 14, 16, or as many as 40 pins protruding from the side:
This is a 16-pin chip. If you hold the chip so the little indentation is at the left (as shown), the pins are numbered 1 through 16 beginning at the lower left and circling around the right side to end with pin 16 at the upper left. The pins on each side are exactly inch apart.
Throughout the 1960s, the space program and the arms race fueled the early integrated circuits market. On the civilian side, the first commercial product that contained an integrated circuit was a hearing aid sold by Zenith in 1964. In 1971, Texas Instruments began selling the first pocket calculator, and Pulsar the first digital watch. (Obviously the IC in a digital watch is packaged much differently from the example just shown.) Many other products that incorporated integrated circuits in their design followed.
In 1965, Gordon E. Moore (then at Fairchild and later a cofounder of Intel Corporation) noticed that technology was improving in such a way that the number of transistors that could fit on a single chip had doubled every year since 1959. He predicted that this trend would continue. The actual trend was a little slower, so Moore's Law (as it was eventually called) was modified to predict a doubling of transistors on a chip every 18 months. This is still an astonishingly fast rate of progress and reveals why home computers always seem to become outdated in just a few short years. Some people believe that Moore's Law will continue to be accurate until about 2015.
In the early days, people used to speak of small-scale integration, or SSI, to refer to a chip that had fewer than 10 logic gates; medium-scale integration, or MSI (10 to 100 gates); and large-scale integration, or LSI (100 to 5000). Then the terms ascended to very-large-scale integration, or VLSI (5000 to 50,000); super-large-scale integration, or SLSI (50,000 to 100,000); and ultra-large-scale integration, (more than 100,000 gates).
For the remainder of this chapter and the next, I want to pause our time machine