1.1 The journey of i.c.technology from micro (1959) to nano (2009  (Page 2/2)

1. Samples bought from DuPont.
2. A high purity single crystal Si ingot grown from the sample.
3. 1.27cm length bar was sliced.
4. By rate growing technique narrow base region was implemented (13 to 25 µm).
5. On 26 ^th January 1954, testing was completed.

In 1955 The first npn BJT made of pure single crystal Silicon at Texas Instrument.

(Announced at IRE conference, Dayton, Ohio).

1. High purity silicon bought from DuPont at $500 a pound.
2. 1.27cm length bar was sliced from the ingot.
3. P Type Base was 25µm thick- thin enough for minority carriers to diffuse through and get collected by the Collector..
4. N Type Emitter was heavily doped to give high injection efficiency.

Texas Instrument had Si BJT market to itself for rest of the decade and thus the stage was set for the emergence of TI as the International giant in field of device manufacturing.

At the time Telephone was invented in 1876 it could not become a Public Utility Service. Only after the invention of RC-coupled Amplifier using Vacuum Tube Triodes and Pentodes that long distance calls across the continents could be made. But even then scope of Electronics Amplifier and scope of Electronics Computer remained limited to Tele-communication and Defense Applications. This was on account of large physical sizes and large energy consumption. Solid State Transistors and later IC Technology only could overcome this limitation of Electronic Applications.

In 1959. Jack Kilby of Texas Instrument and Robert Noyce of FairChild almost simultaneously invented Integrated Circuit Technology. In 1961 the first integrated RTL circuit was commercialzed and in 1964 first Analog IC MC 1530 Operational Amplifier was marketed.

In 1964 the third generation Computer using IC came into market. This was known as Table-Top Computer PDP-8 . This was compact. There was much less power requirement and much more cost affordable.

In 1971 the first microprocessor chip (µP4004) was marketed by INTEL . This laid the foundation of Desk-Top computers belonging to Forth Generation Computers.

The continuous scaling and innovation , led to the rapid micro-miniaturization and functionally complex IC chips as laid down according Moore’s Law.

Gordon Moore predicted that number of transistors on integrated circuits( a rough measure of computer processing power) will double every 18 months at a minimum cost. It became a self fulfilling prophecy . Moore’s Law has become a yardstick of our progress as we harness the cunning of NATURE’s design strategies.

µP4004 was followed by 8085, 8086, 80386, 80486, Pentium I, Pentium II, Pentium III and Pentium IV. Today in 2009 such powerful quad processors have been commercialized that Nvidia advertises its new workstation, the Tesla, as a “personal supercomputer”. It clusters 4 Nvidia C1060 processing boards, each of which unites 240 graphic cores to process instructions at nearly teraflop speed. The evolution of microprocessors chip is given in Table I.5.

EMERGENCE OF KNOWLEDGE BASED SOCIETY.

At the beginning of Civilization we had agrarian economy and it had Labour Intensive Production Methods. With Industrial Revolution in 1750’s we had Capital Intensive Production. Today Computer and World Wide Web has created Knowledge Intensive Production. Today Computerization, Automation , Robotization and on-line Commerce has become imperative to face and survive the competition in the global market. After Industrial Revolution, Steel became the staple of society. In Post-Industrial society Silicon has become the staple of society. Following Table 1 shows the commanding position which Electronics Industry occupies in the present world economy. In fact Electronics Industry has become the main engine of growth for the global economy.

Table 1. Total chips production, electronic hardware generated and total services generated.

As seen from Table 1, the Solid State Devices Industries and its spin off comprises 10% of World GDP(Total World GDP in 2009 is $50 trillion). With passage of time it is growing by leaps and bounds. Educated Guess of Gordon Moore is that 10 ¹⁸ Transistors(BJT&MOS) are produced annually. This is more than all the printed characters in all the newspapers. Today we sell the transistors cheaper than a character sold by Sunday New York Times. Such is the all pervasiveness of Transistors.

Today IC Technology has enabled the World Wide Web where 1 billion PCs are connected to the INTERNET sharing their data, sending and receiving emails and doing distributed computing with the help of hundred thousands of PCs connected to the NET. Google Search engines and their likes have made all data bases available to the NET users.

Zarlink Semiconductors has recently introduced M2A capsule endoscopy. These can travel down through the digestive tract and take photographs of two high-resolution colour images per second