1958 - Kilby demonstrates a “Solid Circuit”
Jack Kilby produces a microcircuit with both active and passive components fabricated from semiconductor material.
Jack Kilby with his lab notebook open at his first solid circuit drawing
Courtesy of: Texas Instruments, Inc.
As electronic systems grew more complex, engineers sought simpler ways to interconnect the thousands of transistors used to implement them. Government agencies funded micro-module and multi-chip hybrid circuit projects in search of a solution to this “tyranny of numbers.” In 1952, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer of the Royal Radar Establishment, England proposed, "With the advent of the transistor (and the work in semiconductors in general), it seems now possible to envisage electronic equipment in a solid block.” In 1953 Harwick Johnson filed a patent for a single-chip phase shift oscillator and worked with Torkel Wallmark on an “integrated semiconductor device” concept announced by RCA in 1958. Yasuro Taru of Japan's MITI filed a patent in 1957 that disclosed junction and FET transistors on one chip. Bell Labs designed a device configured as a telephone stepper. While achieving various degrees of integration, none of these ideas yielded a general-purpose solution to the overall system interconnection problem.
On September 12, 1958, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments built a circuit using germanium mesa p-n-p transistor slices he had etched to form transistor, capacitor, and resistor regions. Using fine gold “flying-wires” he connected them together to demonstrate an oscillator function. One week later he produced an amplifier. T.I. announced Kilby's “solid circuit” concept in March 1959 and introduced its first commercial devices, including the Type 502 Binary Flip-Flop priced at $450 each, in March 1960. However the flying-wire interconnections were not a practical production solution nor did they address the tyranny of numbers issue. With the Series 51 DCTL family in October 1961 they were replaced with Noyce’s deposited metal monolithic approach (1959 Milestone).
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