Volume V · 9 landmarks

Semiconductors

The switch that shrank: transistor to chip to accelerator.

1. 

   1947TransistorIn December 1947 three researchers at Bell Labs built a small sandwich of germanium that could switch and amplify a signal without a glowing glass tube.

2. 

   1958–1959Integrated circuitKilby showed that a circuit’s parts could be made of one piece of semiconductor.

3. 

   1959MOSFETA metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor uses an electric field, across a tiny insulator, to open or close a channel.

4. 

   1960s (planar process)PhotolithographyChips are printed.

5. 

   1965Moore’s observationIn 1965 Gordon Moore noted that the number of components on a chip had doubled on a short cycle and guessed it might continue.

6. 

   1971 (Intel 4004)MicroprocessorA microprocessor puts a computer’s central processing unit on one chip.

7. 

   1990sCMOS image sensorA camera on a chip: each pixel a photodiode plus transistors, made in the same CMOS lines as logic.

8. 

   1999 (GeForce 256); 2012 (AlexNet moment)GPU and acceleratorsA graphics processing unit was built to draw triangles in parallel.

9. 

   2007 (iPhone as mass template)SmartphoneA smartphone is a pocket computer that is also a radio, a camera, a map, and a store of other people’s software.