The IC's Surprising Birth

This article reviews the origin and costs of integrated circuits in the semiconductor industry. Sometimes, a significant integrated circuit achievement might not receive history’s recognition because it simply did not work well. The market might politely applaud a new development, but if another came along that was considerably cheaper, it would be seized hungrily. It would become the market leader and later in history's eyes, might appear to have been first. Jean Hoerni from Fairchild Semiconductor, in Mountain View, CA, developed a new transistor with all parts on one plane. He made connections through an insulating and protecting layer of oxide. Fairchild formed two design teams, one under co-founder Cordon Moore, to develop NPN, and one under co-founder Hoerni, who was working for Moore, to develop PNPs. Both projects were successful—Moore’s NPN, the 2N967, the first high-performance silicon transistor, and Hoerni’s PNP, the 2Nl132. But the NPN was easier to make at first, so Moore chose that one for IBM. Today, ICs house millions of transistors at costs of a fraction of a mil per transistor.