Microelectronics: its unusual origin and personality

Abstract

In the 1950s, Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL), Murray Hill, NJ, was the dominant player in microelectronics and lent its personality to the fledgling industry. Among the Transistor Three, Bardeen was a theorist of unusual depth, Brittain was the creative experimentalist, and Shockley was the versatile scientist, engineer, and inventor. In addition to his well known device and process inventions, he contributed ion implantation and photoresist processing, two of his important innovations that are sometimes overlooked. The bipolar junction transistor (BJT) was his first and very important device invention. While his effort in the business world was notably unsuccessful, it nonetheless unintentionally launched the Silicon Valley phenomenon. At BTL in the 1950s, and subsequently through the industry, heavy reliance on the work of science-educated engineers became the norm. In the late 1950s, Bell failed to embrace the integrated circuit (IC) and persisted in its error for nearly a decade, probably a consequence of NH factors. As a result, it forfeited unchallenged world leadership in microelectronics. Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor launched the IC revolution, with J. Kilby and R. Noyce playing the key respective roles, We now glimpse a different kind of IC that will be fabricated in a fully automatic process.