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The Long Arc of Semiconductor Scaling
The journey from vacuum tubes to transistors, from small ICs to billion-transistor SoCs. Setting the stage for chiplets.
Seeking a solution to reliability issues with the mesa transistor, Fairchild physicist Jean Hoerni recalled an idea he had recorded in December 1957 - a new process in which the oxide layer is left in place on the silicon wafer to protect the sensitive p-n junctions underneath. In 1959, M. M. (John) Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs achieved the first successful insulated-gate field-effect transistor (FET), which had been long anticipated by Lilienfeld, Heil, Shockley and others by overcoming the “surface states” that blocked electric fields from penetrating into the semiconductor material. It takes the ingenuity, persistency, and basic hard work of many dedicated engineers and technicians to put the inventors’ ideas into practice in order to produce inexpensive, high-performance and reliable integrated circuit chips, systems, and consumer products.
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