The Birth of Integrated Circuits (IC)

 At the time of the second World War, electronic devices were not very  complicated. the most complicated circuits was just  dozens of discrete components  like  vacuum tubes that  was the dominant technology at that time . actually vacuum tubes was like transistor in today’s language.

some early attempts for integration began even before the second World War.

Integration mean instead of separately fabricate each electronic component like vacuum tube in that time , resistors ,capacitors ,how about fabricating a bunch of electronic components in a single unit that do a specific function and this complete unit named later ic or integrated circuit.

  consumption and making things smaller and lighter.

  The first attempt for integration was as we said earlier before  the second World War in 1936  . it was done by a british inventor called John Sargrove

He was able to create resistors, capacitors, and inductors, as well as the electrical connections between them on a sheet of molded plastic. And all of this was carried out before the development of pcb or printed circuit board. And he designed a radio on this idea.

And  to sell very low-cost radios to the Indian market , he  founded a company named Sargrove Electronics Ltd, to build the equipment and then produce radios.

At the end of second world the war, frequency allocations for broadcasting were changed, and since his design had all the tuned circuits molded into the substrate, his work became useless. a large order of radios by the Indian government was cancelled.

and investors withdrew their backing of his company , He never found the funds to rebuild his company.

in 1947 transistor was invented by William Shockley and his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs which is the research arm of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T)

the concept was based on the discovery that the flow of electricity through a solid such as silicon can be controlled by adding impurities with the appropriate electronic configurations.

In fact transistor and vacuum tube has similar characterstics . but it is proven that transistor is more reliable , consume less power and smaller in size.

A decade after inventing the first transistor Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain got nobel prize for this invention and after that Shockley started his own semiconductor lab some of his colleagues joined him and others built their own companies like texas instruments ,Fairchild and intel.

In 1950 fairchild developed the first planer transistor. The planar process made it easy to interconnect neighboring transistors on a wafer, paving the way to the first commercial integrated circuits.

In fact the first integrated circuit is developed by texas instruments.

Jack S. Kilby  from Texas Instruments came up with the monolithic idea. His patent application described it as “a novel miniaturized electronic circuit fabricated from a body of semiconductor material containing a diffused p-n junction wherein all components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated into the body of semiconductor material.

it was unworkable because the wire connections arched above the wafer’s surface

Robert Noyce director of research at Fairchild then introduce some editing and that is the wiring is formed metal strips extending over and adherent to the insulating oxide layer for making electrical connections to and between various regions of the semiconductor body without shorting the junctions.

And this is the birth of the first planer integrated circuit.

References

J. S. Kilby, "The integrated circuit's early history," in Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 88, no. 1, pp. 109-111, Jan. 2000, doi: 10.1109/5.811607.

G. E. Moore, "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits, Reprinted from Electronics, volume 38, number 8, April 19, 1965, pp.114 ff.," in IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Newsletter, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 33-35, Sept. 2006, doi: 10.1109/N-SSC.2006.4785860.

R. R. Schaller, "Moore's law: past, present and future," in IEEE Spectrum, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 52-59, June 1997, doi: 10.1109/6.591665.

https://elhg.org.uk/discovery/lives/lives-john-sargrove/