9.2 Evolution of Integrated Circuits
The IC was invented in February 1959 by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments. The planar version of the IC was developed independently by Robert Noyce at Fairchild in July 1959. Since then, the evolution of this technology has been extremely fast paced. One way to gauge the progress of the field is to look at the complexity of ICs as a function of time. Fig. 9–2 shows the number of transistors used in MOS microprocessor IC chips as a function of time. It is amazing that on this semilog plot, where we have plotted the log of the component count as a function of time, we get a straight line over four decades, indicating that there has been an exponential growth in the complexity of chips. The component count has ...
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