Computing · 1958

Integrated circuit

A whole circuit on one piece of semiconductor.

Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments built the first IC on germanium in September 1958, and Robert Noyce at Fairchild made the practical silicon planar version in 1959. Integration let transistor counts grow from a handful to over 200 billion per chip.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Photolithography 1957
Transistor 1947

What it led to 13

Moore's law 1965
Apollo 11 Moon landing 1969
DRAM 1970
CT scanning 1971
Microprocessor (Intel 4004) 1971
Protein Data Bank 1971
Ethernet 1973
Magnetic resonance imaging 1973
Xerox Alto 1973
Digital camera 1975
Cray-1 1976
Tensor Processing Unit 2015
PRIMA retinal implant 2025

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Transistors per microprocessor Latest: 58.2B transistors (2021) Source: Our World in Data

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6

US utility patents granted since 1790 Latest: 352k patents per year (2020) Source: Our World in Data