Ch: 3: Noyce, Kilby, and the Integrated Circuit (Chip War)

William Shockley’s invention of the transistor brought about a revolution in the world of electronics. However, the challenge of mass-producing the transistor to replace the vacuum tubes was an engineering dilemma. Shockley established Shockley Semiconductor with the aim of building the best transistors and licensing the technology from AT&T. The transistor market was uncertain, and it was unclear whether transistors would take off as they needed to either perform better than vacuum tubes or be produced at a lower cost.

The complexity of the wiring between thousands of transistors in computers was a challenge, but Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments was trying to simplify it. Kilby was a brilliant and soft-spoken engineer who was one of the first outside of Bell Labs to use a transistor. Texas Instruments was originally founded to produce equipment using seismic waves for oil drilling but after World War II, they hired engineers to build military systems. Kilby arrived in Dallas during the company’s July holiday period and had time to tinker in the lab. He came up with the idea of assembling multiple components on the same piece of semiconductor material, resulting in the invention of the integrated circuit or chip.

Eight engineers from William Shockley’s semiconductor lab quit and founded their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor. These engineers, also known as the “traitorous eight,” are widely credited with founding Silicon Valley. Bob Noyce, the leader of the group, had a visionary enthusiasm for microelectronics. By the time Fairchild was founded, the science of transistors was clear, but manufacturing them reliably was still a challenge.

Jean Hoerni developed a method of fabricating all parts of a transistor by depositing a protective silicon dioxide layer on a slab of silicon, avoiding exposure to impurities and air. Robert Noyce realized Hoerni’s “planar method” could be used to produce multiple transistors on the same silicon chip, using lines of metal to conduct electricity between the transistors. Noyce’s version of the integrated circuit had no freestanding wires and was built into a single block of material.

Noyce and Gordon Moore realized that miniaturization and electric efficiency were a powerful combination. Noyce’s integrated circuit was vastly more reliable and easier to miniaturize than the mesa transistor, but initially, it cost 50 times more to make. Although Noyce’s invention was brilliant, it needed a market to be successful. The development of the transistor and the integrated circuit was a crucial turning point in the history of electronics, leading to the creation of modern-day computing and communication devices.

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