Moore’s law and the silicon revolution - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 128

Fig. 7.11. Diagrams from Robert Noyce's
patent for ICs. His design used Jean
Hoerni's planar transistors with Kurt
Lehovec's p-n junctions to isolate the
different electrical components.

technology but Khang commented on its potential in a 1961 memo because of
its “ease of fabrication and the possibility of application in integrated circuits.” 8
It was left to two young engineers, Steven Hofstein and Frederic Heiman, at
RCA Corporation's research laboratory in New Jersey to build an experimen-
tal IC using sixteen metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistors. Because
of their small size and low power consumption, more than 99 percent of the
microchips produced today use MOSFET transistors. Both p-type MOSFETs and
n-type MOSFETs are employed in the dominant technology for constructing
ICs, a method known as complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)
technology.
Chip development continued apace, with ever-increasing miniaturization
and complexity. By 1967, chips were being produced that incorporated thou-
sands of transistors. Although the initial steps toward IC development had lit-
tle to do with funding from the U.S. military sector, the U.S. military and the
aerospace community played a key role in improving the quality of chips and
developing better techniques for their mass production. In the early 1960s, at
the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force needed to expand its Minuteman
ballistic missile program ( Fig. 7.12 ). It looked to ICs to replace the discrete elec-
tronic components and increase the computing power ( Fig. 7.13 ). The air force
wanted to produce missiles at a rate of “around six to seven missiles a week,” 9
and it ordered more than four thousand ICs per week from Texas Instruments,
Westinghouse Electric Corporation, and RCA. The air force's insistence on more
reliable components also forced suppliers to introduce “clean rooms” - facilities
with little dust and other pollutants, adapted from those developed at Sandia
National Laboratories in New Mexico for the assembly of atomic weapons.
This expansion of mass production of ICs drove down the costs for
later consumer applications. Together the U.S. Air Force and Navy programs
accounted for the entire $4 million IC market in 1962: by 1968, the U.S. gov-
ernment accounted for only 40 percent of a $300 million IC market. From 1962
to 1968 the average price of an IC dropped from more than $50 per microchip
to about $2.
In 1959, Fairchild Camera and Instrument bought out the eight founders
of Fairchild Semiconductor. The parent company then introduced a more rigid
management style that triggered an exodus of the founders and other talent.
From its beginning with Shockley's first semiconductor company in Mountain
View, the diaspora from Fairchild Semiconductor led to the establishment of

B.7.7. A photograph of Andy Grove,
Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore who
were responsible for making Intel
such a successful chip manufacturer.
Grove, a Hungarian-born engineer
and businessman, was one of the
evangelists behind Intel's relentless
drive to pack more and more transis-
tors on a chip. Grove's topic Only the
Paranoid Survive has become a classic
in business management. Noyce's
nickname was the “Mayor of Silicon
Valley.”