The future on the head of a pin

By Robert Mitchell (mit@umr.edu)

Just as with Dorothy in Th e Wizard of Oz, it was a storm in Kansas that got Jack Kilby go ing. It wasn ' t a twister in Kilby 's case, but an ice storm. His father had a small power company, and the ice storm required the use of amateur radio to get communications established again, From that point on, the young Kilby was hooked on electronics.

The transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Labs. Eleven years later, in his first 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 the integrated circuit was born. Kilby's invention unleashed the world-changing 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 countered with Explorer. The space race was on , and military press ures drove technology development. Few could predict then that the IC's invention that very yeaJ would change the world for the next 40 years and for maybe 40 more.

The first applications of the new ICs were for the Minuteman mj ss ile. Tom HelTi ck, EE'58 , MS EE'68, a faculty member in electrical and computer engineering, recalls that while working on the Navy 's Sidewinder missile in 1959, vacuum tubes were very sensitive to vibration. The new rcs were a perfect solution to the vibration problem.

By the mjd-1960s, Kilby remembers thinking that the IC business was about the same size as the dog food business. But it was growing exponenti all y and has not 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 doubling 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 fail. They also said that if this rate of component growth succeeded somehow, it would 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 would resu lt. rcs made their way rapidly into the booming radio and TV business, but the first dramatic impact in the consumer market was with the calculator. Texas Instruments produced the 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 scientific calculator. It weighed on ly 9 ounces and fit in a shirt pocket. Thousands of mathematics 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, especially on trips to government labs where I needed to appear state-of-the-art.

Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (credited as coinventor of the IC) founded Intel in 1968, and they introduced the 4004 microprocessor in 1970. Two years later came the 8008, an 8-bit mi croprocesso r. Industry after industry experi enced tidal waves of change as the performance and price of ICs found new

MSM· UMR ALUMNUS ! Willler 1999 II