History of Semiconductor
The history of semiconductor is backed by 2 major events which led to 3 decades of semiconductor innovation.
1. The innovation of transistor in 1947. This replaced traditional radio(vacuum) to transistorized radio. The founder of Sony, Mr. Masaru Ibuka innovated it in Bell Labs, USA.
2. The Innovation of Integrated Circuits in 1959. At this time, chips used to have logic gates inside, externally connected to analog circuits to perform operations.
By 1970, we had pocket calculators. In the 1980s we had Walkman, CD Players, and VCRs. By 1990 we had Nokia’s Smartphones, Apple iPods, etc.
Shockley is credited for bringing silicon to Silicon Valley. He was working at Bell lab and after transistor innovation, he left Bell Labs and returned to Palo Alto, CA, where he had been brought up. He started his own lab — Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a division of Beckman Instruments and tried to lure ex-colleagues from Bell Labs. He failed, he tried to bring the brightest young graduates to build the new company. This was truly the genesis of Silicon Valley and some of its culture that still exists today. As a person, Shockley was quite caustic and after some time he discontinued his research. Almost all semiconductor companies, notably Intel, AMD, and National Semiconductor (now part of Texas Instruments) have their roots in Fairchild in one way or another. For this reason, they were referred to as “Fairchildren.”
Followed by IC innovation in 1959, the innovation of the “Planar” manufacturing process. It enabled mass production of the transistors. Jack Kilby from Texas Instruments received Noble Price in 2000 for his contribution. It became a big blow.
Followed by these events, Intel was founded by ex-Fairchild Mr. Gordon Moore(Moore state machine from the digital circuit). Later after a decade, things were taking shape and US Defence wanted a fast solution for their Jet. This was a privatized military project. IBM and 2 small companies automated digital front-end. This was done using a programming language VHDL. At the same time, A small company named Gateway Design Automation created Verilog for the Verification of Digital Circuits.
Innovations are stacked now. One after another, revisions, additions, upgrades and we are continuously moving ahead. This was till 1990. Everything else is witnessed by all of us. Now, Semiconductor is probing into making 2nm transistor (we started with 500, 350, 200, 180 mm to 36, 18, 10, 7 5 nm transistor size). Now we are at the saturation level where a transistor cannot be reduced further with the Semiconductor fabrication process. However, things like this have been happening since 1970. There are ups and downs. The Semiconductor Industry is the godhead of technological evolution. This industry has huge funding which can sustain 3 more decades.
Now you are wondering where I got this all? Here it is.