Computing · 1957

Photolithography

Printing circuits with light, the way photographs are printed.

Jay Lathrop and James Nall at the US Army's Diamond Ordnance Fuze Labs patterned transistors with photoresist, and Bell Labs developed oxide masking. Every chip since has been made by printing ever-finer patterns with light.

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 3

Transistor 1947
Photography 1839
Lithography 1796

What it led to 4

Integrated circuit 1958
Planar process 1959
Wafer stepper 1978
Excimer laser lithography 1982

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