In 1951, William Shockley developed the junction transistor, a more practical form of the transistor, the point contact transistor was difficult to produce and was replaced by the junction transistor by the mid fifties. By 1954 the transistor was an essential component of the telephone system. Bell labs also licensed the transistor to other companies (for a royalty) and the transistor first appeared in hearing aids followed by radios. In 1956 the importance of the invention of the transistor by Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley was recognized by the Nobel Prize in physics.
1952 - Single crystal silicon is fabricated [5]
1952 - Integrated Circuit concept published
English radar scientist Geoffrey W.A. Dummer publishes the concept of the integrated circuit in Washington D.C. on May 7, 1952. "Solid block [with] layers of insulating materials". In 1956 Dummer unsuccessfully attemped to build an integrated circuit.
1954 - First commercial silicon transistor [1]
On May 10, 1954, Texas Instruments announced the commercial availability of grown-junction silicon transistors. These first silicon transistors were constructed by cutting a rectangular bar from a silicon crystal that was grown from a melt containing impurities. Silicon transistors were less expensive to produce and operated at higher temperature than germanium transistors.
1954 - Oxide masking process developed [5]
Bell Labs developed the oxidation, photomasking, etching, diffusion process that underlies IC production to this day.
1954 - First Transistor Radios [23]
Industrial Development Engineer Associates produced the Regency TR-1, the worlds first commercially marketed transistor radio. The radio had a four transistor circuit employing Texas Instruments Germanium transistors.
1955 - First field effect transistor
Bell Labs fabricated the first field effect transistor.
1958 - Integrated circuit invented [1],[6]
In July of 1958, Jack Kilby was a recent hire at Texas Instruments. Not having accrued enough vacation time yet, Kilby was at work at TI during a summer vacation period that most everyone else had off. On July 24, 1958 in the quiet of the miniaturization lab, Kilby wrote in his lab notebook that circuit elements such as resistors, capacitors, distributed capacitors and transistors, if all made of the same material, could be included in a single chip. By September 12th 1958 Kilby had built a simple oscillator IC with five integrated components. In 1959 Kilby applied for a patent and Texas Instruments was issued U.S. patent # 3,138,743 for "Miniaturized electronic circuits". In 2000 the importance of the IC was recognized when Kilby shared the Nobel prize in physics with two others. Kilby was sited by the Nobel committee "for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit".
1959 - Planar technology invented [1]
Kilby's invention had a serious drawback, the individual circuit elements were connected together with gold wires making the circuit difficult to scale up to any complexity. By late 1958 Swiss-born physicist - Jean Hoerni at Fairchild had developed a structure with N and P junctions formed in silicon. Over the junctions a thin layer of silicon dioxide was used as an insulator and holes were etched open in the silicon dioxide to connect to the junctions. Czech-born physicist - Kurt Lehovec of Sprague Electric developed the technque of using PN junctions to electrically isolate components. In 1959, Robert Noyce also of Fairchild had the idea to create an integrated circuit by combing Hoerni's and Lehovec's processes and evaporating a thin metal layer over the circuits. The metal layer connected down to the junctions through the holes in the silicon dioxide and was then etched into a pattern to interconnect the circuit. Planar technology set the stage for complex integrated circuits and is the process used today.
