Stone to Silicon

Computing · 1959

MOSFET

The transistor design that became the most manufactured object in history.

Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs built the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor. Easy to shrink and pack densely, it underpins virtually every modern chip.

See it in the living treeWikipedia

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

What it led to 6

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