Today in History… April 26 — Integrated Circuit is Patented by Robert Noyce

Apr 26

Edited by Gerald Boerner

Commentary:

As so often happens, two scientists/researchers come across very similar discoveries at about the same time. And when those concerned are more entrepreneurial and emotionally involved, this leads to contention and fighting. In the case of today’s exploration of the invention, the integrated circuit, this contention did not occur. The two principals, Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby shared the honor and were happy to be credited as co-founders of the integrated circuit.

Kilby, the first to create this complex chip was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for his invention. This chip was the breakthrough technology that has enabled the micro computer an untold hand held devices in use today.

Wikipedia summarizes this technology as:

“An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as IC, chip, and microchip) is an electronic circuit manufactured by diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material.

“Integrated circuits are used in virtually all electronic equipment today and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, cellular phones, and other digital appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the low cost of production of integrated circuits.”

So let’s get started our exploration of the invention and patenting of the integrated circuit… GLB

These Introductory Comments are copyrighted:
Copyright©2011 — Gerald Boerner — All Rights Reserved

[ 3419 Words ]

Quotations Related to SEMICONDUCTOR:

“We have been a fabless semiconductor company for a number of years now.”
— David Milne

“My project was radiation damage of Si and Ge by energetic electrons, critical for the use of the recently developed semiconductor devices for applications in outer space.”
— Walter Kohn

“It was at Bell Labs that I first made direct contact with real semiconductor experts and thus began to fully understand what amazing materials they were and what they could do.”
— Robert B. Laughlin

“Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.”
— Ralph Merkle

“The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I’m talking about an organic computer – about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.”
— Alvin Toffler

“They were the largest semiconductor maker in the world up until about 1980. I’m not sure that that can be re-gained again, but their progress in the last few years has been very impressive.”
— Jack Kilby

“Well, I think first of all, probably the most fundamental thing is that we are a mixed-signal analog semiconductor company, which, along with some of the other well-known names in the industry, enjoys very good economics.”
— David Milne

“And then lo and behold IBM, Apple and Motorola took an ad in all the newspapers, double page ad, and said, announcing the chip that they were now able to manufacture it and that they were going to kill Intel.”
— Arthur Rock

First Integrated Circuit is Patented by Robert Noyce…

An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as IC, chip, and microchip) is an electronic circuit manufactured by diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material.

Integrated circuits are used in virtually all electronic equipment today and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, cellular phones, and other digital appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the low cost of production of integrated circuits.

Robert Norton Noyce (December 12, 1927 – June 3, 1990), nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968. He is also credited (along with Jack Kilby) with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip. While Kilby’s invention was six months earlier, neither man rejected the title of co-inventor. Noyce was also a mentor and father-figure to an entire generation of entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs at Apple, Inc.

Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 – June 20, 2005) was a Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 2000 for his invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at Texas Instruments (TI). He is also the inventor of the handheld calculator and thermal printer.

Introduction to Integrated Circuits

Synthetic detail of an integrated circuit through
four layers of planarized copper interconnect,
down to the polysilicon (pink), wells (greyish),
and substrate (green).

Integrated circuits were made possible by experimental discoveries which showed that semiconductor devices could perform the functions of vacuum tubes and by mid-20th-century technology advancements in semiconductor device fabrication. The integration of large numbers of tiny transistors into a small chip was an enormous improvement over the manual assembly of circuits using electronic components. The integrated circuit’s mass production capability, reliability, and building-block approach to circuit design ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of designs using discrete transistors.

There are two main advantages of ICs over discrete circuits: cost and performance. Cost is low because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit by photolithography rather than being constructed one transistor at a time. Furthermore, much less material is used to construct a packaged IC die than a discrete circuit. Performance is high since the components switch quickly and consume little power (compared to their discrete counterparts) because the components are small and positioned close together. As of 2006, chip areas range from a few square millimeters to around 350 mm², with up to 1 million transistors per mm².

Terminology

Integrated circuit originally referred to a miniaturized electronic circuit consisting of semiconductor devices, as well as passive components bonded to a substrate or circuit board. This configuration is now commonly referred to as a hybrid integrated circuit. Integrated circuit has since come to refer to the single-piece circuit construction originally known as a monolithic integrated circuit.

Invention

Early developments of the integrated circuit go back to 1949, when the German engineer Werner Jacobi (Siemens AG) filed a patent for an integrated-circuit-like semiconductor amplifying device showing five transistors on a common substrate arranged in a 2-stage amplifier arrangement. Jacobi discloses small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent. A commercial use of his patent has not been reported.

The idea of the integrated circuit was conceived by a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer (1909–2002), who published it at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. on May 7, 1952. He gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas. Dummer unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956.

A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic squares (wafers), each one containing a single miniaturized component. Components could then be integrated and wired into a bidimensional or tridimensional compact grid. This idea, which looked very promising in 1957, was proposed to the US Army by Jack Kilby, and led to the short-lived Micromodule Program (similar to 1951′s Project Tinkertoy). However, as the project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design: the IC.

Robert Noyce credited Kurt Lehovec of Sprague Electric for the principle of p-n junction isolation caused by the action of a biased p-n junction (the diode) as a key concept behind the IC.

Jack Kilby‘s original integrated circuit

Jack Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958 and successfully demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on September 12, 1958. In his patent application of February 6, 1959, Kilby described his new device as “a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated.” Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part of the invention of the integrated circuit.

Robert Noyce also came up with his own idea of an integrated circuit half a year later than Kilby. Noyce’s chip solved many practical problems that Kilby’s had not. Noyce’s chip, made at Fairchild Semiconductor, was made of silicon, whereas Kilby’s chip was made of germanium.

Advances in Integrated Circuits

Among the most advanced integrated circuits are the microprocessors or "cores", which control everything from computers and cellular phones to digital microwave ovens. Digital memory chips and ASICs are examples of other families of integrated circuits that are important to the modern information society. While the cost of designing and developing a complex integrated circuit is quite high, when spread across typically millions of production units the individual IC cost is minimized. The performance of ICs is high because the small size allows short traces which in turn allows low power logic (such as CMOS) to be used at fast switching speeds.

The die from an Intel 8742, an 8-bit
microcontroller that includes a CPU
running at 12 MHz, 128 bytes of RAM,
2048 bytes of EPROM, and I/O in the
same chip.

ICs have consistently migrated to smaller feature sizes over the years, allowing more circuitry to be packed on each chip. This increased capacity per unit area can be used to decrease cost and/or increase functionality—see Moore’s law which, in its modern interpretation, states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years. In general, as the feature size shrinks, almost everything improves—the cost per unit and the switching power consumption go down, and the speed goes up. However, ICs with nanometer-scale devices are not without their problems, principal among which is leakage current (see subthreshold leakage for a discussion of this), although these problems are not insurmountable and will likely be solved or at least ameliorated by the introduction of high-k dielectrics. Since these speed and power consumption gains are apparent to the end user, there is fierce competition among the manufacturers to use finer geometries. This process, and the expected progress over the next few years, is well described by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS).

In current research projects, integrated circuits are also developed for sensoric applications in medical implants or other bioelectronic devices. Particular sealing strategies have to be taken in such biogenic environments to avoid corrosion or biodegradation of the exposed semiconductor materials. As one of the few materials well established in CMOS technology, titanium nitride TiN turned out as exceptionally stable and well suited for electrode applications in medical implants.

Classification

A CMOS 4000 IC in a DIP

Integrated circuits can be classified into analog, digital and mixed signal (both analog and digital on the same chip).

Digital integrated circuits can contain anything from one to millions of logic gates, flip-flops, multiplexers, and other circuits in a few square millimeters. The small size of these circuits allows high speed, low power dissipation, and reduced manufacturing cost compared with board-level integration. These digital ICs, typically microprocessors, DSPs, and micro controllers work using binary mathematics to process "one" and "zero" signals.

Analog ICs, such as sensors, power management circuits, and operational amplifiers, work by processing continuous signals. They perform functions like amplification, active filtering, demodulation, mixing, etc. Analog ICs ease the burden on circuit designers by having expertly designed analog circuits available instead of designing a difficult analog circuit from scratch.

ICs can also combine analog and digital circuits on a single chip to create functions such as A/D converters and D/A converters. Such circuits offer smaller size and lower cost, but must carefully account for signal interference.

Packaging

The earliest integrated circuits were packaged in ceramic flat packs, which continued to be used by the military for their reliability and small size for many years. Commercial circuit packaging quickly moved to the dual in-line package (DIP), first in ceramic and later in plastic. In the 1980s pin counts of VLSI circuits exceeded the practical limit for DIP packaging, leading to pin grid array (PGA) and leadless chip carrier (LCC) packages. Surface mount packaging appeared in the early 1980s and became popular in the late 1980s, using finer lead pitch with leads formed as either gull-wing or J-lead, as exemplified by small-outline integrated circuit — a carrier which occupies an area about 30–50% less than an equivalent DIP, with a typical thickness that is 70% less. This package has "gull wing" leads protruding from the two long sides and a lead spacing of 0.050 inches.

Early USSR-made integrated circuit

In the late 1990s, plastic quad flat pack (PQFP) and thin small-outline package (TSOP) packages became the most common for high pin count devices, though PGA packages are still often used for high-end microprocessors. Intel and AMD are currently transitioning from PGA packages on high-end microprocessors to land grid array (LGA) packages.

Ball grid array (BGA) packages have existed since the 1970s. Flip-chip Ball Grid Array packages, which allow for much higher pin count than other package types, were developed in the 1990s. In an FCBGA package the die is mounted upside-down (flipped) and connects to the package balls via a package substrate that is similar to a printed-circuit board rather than by wires. FCBGA packages allow an array of input-output signals (called Area-I/O) to be distributed over the entire die rather than being confined to the die periphery.

Traces out of the die, through the package, and into the printed circuit board have very different electrical properties, compared to on-chip signals. They require special design techniques and need much more electric power than signals confined to the chip itself.

When multiple dies are put in one package, it is called SiP, for System In Package. When multiple dies are combined on a small substrate, often ceramic, it’s called an MCM, or Multi-Chip Module. The boundary between a big MCM and a small printed circuit board is sometimes fuzzy.

The Co-Inventors of the Integrated Circuit

Robert Norton Noyce (December 12, 1927 – June 3, 1990), nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968. He is also credited (along with Jack Kilby) with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip. While Kilby’s invention was six months earlier, neither man rejected the title of co-inventor. Noyce was also a mentor and father-figure to an entire generation of entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs at Apple, Inc.

He graduated from Grinnell High School in 1945 and entered Grinnell College in the fall of that year. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in physics and mathematics from Grinnell College in 1949. He also received a signal honor from his classmates: the Brown Derby Prize, which recognized "the senior man who earned the best grades with the least amount of work". He received his Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953. He studied the first transistors, developed at Bell Laboratories, in a Grinnell College classroom.

While an undergraduate, Noyce attended a physics course of the professor Grant Gale and was fascinated by the physics. Gale got hold of two of the very first transistors ever to come out of Bell Labs and showed them off to his class and Noyce was hooked.

After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953, he took his first job as a research engineer at the Philco Corporation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He left in 1956 for the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California.

He joined William Shockley at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a division of Beckman Instruments, but left with the "Traitorous Eight". in 1957, because of the poor management of the company, to create the influential Fairchild Semiconductor corporation. According to Sherman Fairchild, Noyce’s impassioned presentation of his vision was the reason Sherman Fairchild had agreed to create the semiconductor division for the Traitorous Eight.

Noyce and Gordon E. Moore founded Intel in 1968 when they left Fairchild Semiconductor. Arthur Rock, the chairman of Intel’s board and a major investor in the company said that for Intel to succeed, Intel needed Noyce, Moore and Grove. And it needed them in that order. Noyce: the visionary, born to inspire; Moore: the virtuoso of technology; and Grove: the technologist turned management scientist. The relaxed culture that Noyce brought to Intel was a carry-over from his style at Fairchild Semiconductor. He treated employees as family, rewarding and encouraging team work. His follow-your-bliss management style set the tone for many Valley success stories. Noyce’s management style could be called "roll up your sleeves." He shunned fancy corporate cars, reserved parking spaces, private jets, offices, and furnishings in favor of a less-structured, relaxed working environment in which everyone contributed and no one benefited from lavish perquisites. By declining the usual executive perks he stood as a model for future generations of Intel CEOs. At Intel, he oversaw Ted Hoff’s invention of the microprocessor—that was his second revolution

Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 – June 20, 2005) was a Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 2000 for his invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at Texas Instruments (TI). He is also the inventor of the handheld calculator and thermal printer.

Kilby received his bachelor of science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is an honorary member of Acacia Fraternity. In 1947, he received a degree in Electrical Engineering. He obtained his master of science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Extension in Milwaukee, later to become the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1950, while simultaneously working at Centralab in Milwaukee.

In mid-1958, Kilby was a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments who did not yet have the right to a summer vacation. He spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design that was commonly called the "tyranny of numbers" and finally came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12 he presented his findings to the management, which included Mark Shepherd, of Texas Instruments: he showed them a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached, pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave, proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he solved the problem. U.S. Patent 3,138,743 for "Miniaturized Electronic Circuits", the first integrated circuit, was filed on February 6, 1959. Along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later), Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit.

Please take time to further explore more about Integrated Circuit, Electronic
Circuit, Semiconductor, Integrated Circuit Design, Robert Noyce, and Jack
Kilby by accessing the Wikipedia articles referenced below. In most cases,
the text in the body of this post has been selectively excerpted from the
articles; footnotes and hyperlinks have been removed for readability…

References

Other Events on this Day:

In 1598…
An expedition led by Spanish explorer Juan de Onate reaches the Rio Grande.

In 1607…
Capt. Christopher Newport and 104 English settlers aboard the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia. Farther up the James River, 40 miles inland at Jamestown, they will establish the first permanent European settlement in North America.

In 1865…
Federal troops surround and kill John Wiles Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln, near Bowling Green, Virginia.

In 1937…
The German Luftwaffe bombs the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, killing or wounding hundreds of the town’s 5,000 residents. Less than two months later, Pablo Picasso completes the painting Guernica, immortalizing the town’s destruction.

In 1961…
The integrated circuit is patented by Robert Noyce. Integrated circuits are used in virtually all electronic equipment today and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, cellular phones, and other digital appliances made possible by the low cost of production.

In 1986…
A powerful explosion at the number 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near present-day Pripyat, Ukraine, immediately kills 31 people and releases high levels of radioactivity into the atmosphere, eventually causing illness and death among thousands of others in the surrounding region. The area around Chernobyl continues to be uninhabitable.