Can you tell me where you could see an integrated circuit (IC)? If electrons are the building blocks of science, then ICs are the building blocks of the semiconductor industry. So be it your mobile phones, televisions, video-games or computers, these ICs power just about everything.
While electrons, as one of the fundamental units of an atom , have always been around, the same cannot be said of these ICs. They came about only in the late 1960s and it was the advent of these circuits that gave birth to the semiconductor industry as we know it today.
Wasn’t it Kilby?
While Jack Kilby shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the IC and Robert Noyce is also credited as one of the inventors along with Kilby, both of them were building on the work done before them. For, the integrated circuit, which brings together components with different functions in a compact board, was first described publicly by Geoffrey Dummer.
Geoffrey Dummer .
Like many other technological developments of that time, the IC too came as an offshoot from World War II. The task of improving the reliability of Royal Air Force’s radar equipment fell on Dummer, who worked with the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE).
The idea
Dummer gathered a small team of researchers and got to work based at Malvern, Worcestershire. His work led him to the belief that multiple circuit elements could be fabricated on and into a single substance. On May 7, 1952, Dummer presented this idea of his at the US Electronic Components Symposium in Washington DC.
“With the advent of the transistor and the work on semi-conductors generally, it now seems possible to envisage electronic equipment in a solid block with no connecting wires,” Dummer is believed to have said to the gathered audience. “The block may consist of layers of insulating, conducting, rectifying and amplifying materials, the electronic functions being connected directly by cutting out areas of the various layers.”
Prophecy comes true
Dummer got to work on what “seemed so logical” to him, but he lacked experience with active devices and couldn’t zero in on suitable manufacturing techniques. As the prototype failed to make its way through, the Ministry of Defence began to lose interest. It wasn’t long before the funding for the project trickled to a zero.
Interest, by now, had sizably increased on the other side of the Atlantic as the race to address the problem of elaborate circuits with innumerable components gathered momentum.
Risks and results
Kilby found a solution in the summer of 1958 and had a prototype ready by September the same year. Noyce then pitched in with answers for problems relating to interconnects, and the practical ICs were soon making their mark.
While Dummer made no claim as the inventor of microelectronics, he did observe that United Kingdom’s lack of risk-taking ability as opposed to the financial gambles that the Americans took, was the reason behind their failure. As for mankind as a whole, ICs have revolutionised our world and are virtually in every electronic equipment.
