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The future on the head of a pin Ju st as with Doroth y in Th e Wizard of Oz, it was a storm in Kansas th at got Jack Kilby go ing. It wasn ' t a twister in Kilby 's case, but an ice storm. His father had a small power co mp any, and the ice storm required the use of amateur radio to get communications es tablished again, From that point on, the yo un g Kilby was hooked on electronics. The transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Labs. Eleven years later, in his fir st year of employment at Texas Instruments, Kilby had the idea to make not on ly transistors and diodes, but also resistors, capacitors, and other elements - all from a single pi ece of silicon. And so th e integrated circuit was born. Kilby's invention unleashed the world -changin g potential for reli able, low-power, miniaturized electronics that has since been realized. By January 1958, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik. Three weeks later the United States co untered with Explorer. The space race was on , and military press ures drove technology development. Few could predict then that th e IC's invention th at very yeaJ wou ld change the world for the next 40 years and for maybe 40 more . The fir st applications of the new ICs were for th e Minuteman mj ss ile. Tom HelTick, EE'58 , MS EE'68 , a fa culty member in electri cal and co mputer engineering , recalls that while working on the Navy 's Sidewinder missile in 1959, vacuum tubes were very sensiti ve to vibration. The new rcs were a perfect solution to the vibration problem. By the mjd-1960s, Kilby remembers thinking th at the IC business was about the sa me size as the dog food business. But it was growing exponenti all y and has not
By Robert Mitchell (mit@umr.edu)
slowed down since. An IC that cost $ 1,000 in 1959 was only $ 10 in 1965. Intel pioneer Gordon Moore observed in 1964 that the number of components in an IC was doublin g every 18 months. (His observation became canonized as Moore's Law). Critics said that the more components you put on an IC, the more ]jkely it was to fai l. They also said that if thi s rate of component growth succeeded so mehow, it wo uld put nearly all the circuit designers out of business . Well, the critics were right, but they didn ' t foresee the improvements in cost and performance and the many new businesses and challenges that wo uld resu lt. rcs made the ir way rapidl y into the booming radio and TV business, but the first dramatic impact in the consumer market was with the calculator. Texas Instruments produced th e first handheld calculator in 1967. It was 6 inches by 4 inches and weighed 45 ounces. Joe Miner's slide rul e met its Waterloo in 1972 when Hewlett-Packard produced the HP-35 , the first scientifi c calc ulator. It weighed on ly 9 ounces and fit in a shirt pocket. Thousands of math ematics tables became obsolete almost overnight. I remember the HP45 my wife Jane gave me in 1973 (it cost her $400). I was a new facu lty member and I wore it with pride on my belt, especiall y on trips to government labs where I needed to appear state-of-the-art. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (credited as coin ventor of th e IC) founded Intel in 1968, and they introdu ced the 4004 microprocessor in 1970. Two years later came the 8008 , an 8- bit mi croprocesso r. Industry after industry ex peri enced tid al waves of change as th e perfo rm ance and price of ICs found new
MSM¡ UMR ALU MNUS ! Willler 1999
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