The integrated circuit

Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently put multiple transistors onto single pieces of semiconductor.

Why it matters

Transistors stopped being wired together by hand and started being printed together — the precondition for Moore's law. Complexity itself became manufacturable.

People

Jack Kilby · Robert Noyce

Threads

This event sits on Computation.

Related events

• 1947

  The transistor, three weeks after Christmas

  Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated a point-contact transistor at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947, with Shockley's team driving the solid-state program.

  Computing · americas

• 1971

  A computer on a chip

  Intel's 4004 packed a complete CPU — 2,300 transistors — onto one chip, built for a Japanese calculator and priced accordingly.

  Computing · americas

• 1969

  Apollo 11 lands on the Moon

  Four days after launch, Armstrong and Aldrin flew the LM Eagle to Tranquility Base with about 30 seconds of fuel margin; Collins waited in orbit.

  Exploration

Sources

• Nobel Prize — Integrated Circuit