The Endless Journey after Transistor

          The real electronics what it is called today was actually started after the discovery of the transistor effect. Transistor opened the road for the electronics and there after electronics got its independent identity in electrical engineering. More importantly it opened the road for the computing world. Computers of various types started hitting the market and the research works got a boost.

          Some other problems were also there like the assembling of the electronic components on a single mother board. It was worsened when the metallic contacts cross each other and crowded the mother board. Jack Kilby in Texas Instruments found a very nice solution. He suggested to throw away all the wires and tried to connect the resistors, capacitors and transistors on the same piece of wafer internally. Surprisingly his ideas worked and gave birth to the Integrated Circuit industries. At around the same time Shockley had left Bell Labs and started his own company in California, whose name was Shockley Semiconductor. Some other brilliant young researchers also joined his company there. Among them who are famous today are Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Jean Hoerni. Robert Noyce also did many contributions to the IC technology by joining the Fairchild Company and the Fairchild Semiconductor was born. By the efforts of both Noyce and Kilby the IC industry became very popular and looked forward for its next successor, the microprocessor. Another history was being made in the USSR at the same time. The first artificial satellite Sputnik was sent to the space. There was a big demand for the better electronic components for the control and performance of the satellite and other electrical devices like the big motors and generators. Huge demand of transistors and ICs revolutionised the electronics industry at that time. A new type of transistor was invented in early sixties, which is known as MOSFET. MOSFET is slower than the junction transistor but it is smaller, chipper and consumes less power.

          In 1965 Gordon Moore came out with an awesome paper called “Cramming more Components onto Integrated Circuits”. In that paper he described that the number of transistors used on a singe chip of silicon will grow exponentially. In 1968 Rob Noyce and Moore left Fairchild to start Intel, both of whom were very popular already in the field of microelectronics. In 1971 their company invented the first microprocessor well known as 4004 having 2300 transistors on one silicon chip. The credit mainly goes to the young engineer Ted Hoff. While working on a Japanese project he found some problems with integrated circuits and planned to have even larger integrated circuits which can have the whole computer on a single chip. That microprocessor led the way to the successors like the 8080, 8085, 80486, Pentium series and the most modern processors like the Xeon too.