Rightways: This Day In Tech Events That Shaped the Wired World May 7, 1952: The Integrated Circuit … What a Concept!

Friday, May 7, 2010

This Day In Tech Events That Shaped the Wired World May 7, 1952: The Integrated Circuit … What a Concept!

1952: British radar engineer Geoffrey Dummer introduces the concept of the integrated circuit at a tech conference in the United States. The world is about to change.

At the heart of every electronic device today — from computers to aircraft navigation systems — is a little circuit that has changed computing and ushered in the digital era, much as the steam engine helped usher in the Industrial Revolution.

The integrated circuit brings together components with different functions and puts them in a compact miniature board. The credit for the first working example eventually went to Texas Instruments engineer Jack Kilby. But Kilby was building on work done before him.

Dummer, who worked for his country’s defense ministry, first published the idea of an integrated circuit at the 1952 Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C.

“With the advent of the transistor and the work in semiconductors generally, it seems now possible to envisage electronic equipment in a solid block with no connecting wires,” he told the audience at the conference, according to the Electronic Product News. ”The block may consist of layers of insulating, conducting, rectifying and amplifying materials, the electronic functions being connected directly by cutting out areas of the various layers.”

Dummer tried unsuccessfully for the next few years to build such a circuit, until the British Government turned off the funding for his project.

By then, work on the idea of the IC had moved to the United States. The challenge with creating a practical IC was that all the components in the circuit had to have no faults. Also, there couldn’t be too many wires in the interconnects for a complex circuit, or else the circuit would be slow.

Kilby found a solution in the summer of 1958. His idea was to make all the components and the chip out of the same block of semiconductor material, and layer the metal needed to connect them on top of it.

The first integrated circuit was fairly crude — it had only a transistor and other components on a slice of germanium. But it did show the potential of the IC, which continues today to get smaller and more complex.
Just a few months later, Robert Noyce, one of the co-founders of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, solved some of the problems related to the interconnects, sharing the credit with Kilby for the practical IC.

Kilby patented the invention and won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in the creation of the IC.

Dummer died in February 2002 at the age of 93.

Photo: First integrated circuit by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958.
Courtesy Texas Instruments

By Priya Ganapati