THE HISTORY OF SEMICONDUCTORS

200-year timetable of the semiconductor business

We set up an intelligent sequence of key occasions throughout the entire existence of semiconductors.


What strikes a chord when you consider semiconductors? In 2021, presumably words like "deficiency," "inventory network," and "Taiwan."

Yet, assuming you had been pondering semiconductors 10 years prior, it could have been "cell phone." And way, thinking back to the 1950s, it might have been "Texas Instruments," or even "germanium" (silicon wasn't suitable for semiconductors until 1954). During the 1800s, you'd likely say "semi-what?"

Beginning around 1965, semiconductors have pursued an outstanding direction called Moore's Law, generally multiplying the quantity of semiconductors that can fit on a coordinated circuit at regular intervals. That has empowered the formation of more modest gadgets, as cell phones, equipped for computational power far more noteworthy than the enormous, room-sized centralized server PCs of days gone by, and made ready for AI, distributed computing, independent vehicles, and other computationally concentrated innovations.

"What occurred with semiconductors is, while turning out to be more perplexing and skilled, they unfathomably improved on them," Shahin Farshchi, an accomplice at Lux Capital and a previous electrical specialist, told Emerging Tech Brew. "That is the enchanted that semiconductors brought. By imploding a large number of parts into successfully a solitary piece of glass, they had the option to make these machines many significant degrees millions, in the event that not billions, of times more complicated while making them millions and billions of times more straightforward simultaneously."

Presently, the semiconductor business is valued at an expected $527 billion dollars, and billions of dollars in private and public speculation is streaming into the area as the continuous lack demonstrates exactly the way in which basic this little gadget is.

To arrive at this point expected something like 200 years of science, designing, business, and strategy propels and underneath is a course of events we set up of a few vital crossroads in semiconductor history. This is certifiably not a complete course of events, but instead an illustrative one, intended to give a feeling of the many, numerous commitments it took to arrive.



A 200-year history of semiconductors, the backbone of the digital revolution.


Johann Seebeck

1821

German physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck first notices the thermoelectric effect of semiconducting metals.




 Michael Faraday

1833

English scientist Michael Faraday discovers electrical conduction increases with temperature in silver sulfide crystals.


1874

German electrical engineer and physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun discovers that a point-contact semiconductor rectifies, or converts alternating current into direct current.








1894

Physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose of India discovers the use of the crystals to detect radio waves

1901

Jagadish Chandra Bose patents semiconductor rectifiers as “cat’s whisker” detectors to detect radio waves.



1904

John Ambrose Fleming uses the “Edison effect,” to invent the two-electrode vacuum tube rectifier, an early precursor of the modern semiconductor.


Julius Lilienfeld patents the concept of a field-effect semiconductor device, specifically a three-electrode amplifying device based on the semiconducting properties of copper sulfide.


1931
ALAN WILSON PUBLISHES “THE THEORY OF ELECTRONIC SEMICONDUCTORS,” WHICH USES QUANTUM MECHANICS TO EXPLAIN SEMICONDUCTOR PROPERTIES.

1940

American engineer Russell Ohl discovers the p-n junction and photovoltaic effects in silicon, leading to the development of solar cells and junction transistors.



1946

ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose computer, is announced. (By the time it stops operating in 1956, it features 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighs about 30 tons, and takes up a 160-square-meter room. One of the largest electronic systems ever at the time, it consists of a total of about 110,000 electronic circuit devices.)









1947

AMERICANS JOHN BARDEEN, WILLIAM SHOCKLEY AND WALTER BRATTAIN DEVELOP THE BIPOLAR POINT-CONTACT TRANSISTOR AT BELL LABORATORIES



JAPANESE ENGINEERS JUN-ICHI NISHIZAWA AND Y. WATANABE INVENT THE STATIC INDUCTION TRANSISTOR (SIT), A TYPE OF JUNCTION-GATE FIELD-EFFECT TRANSISTOR (JFET) WITH A SHORT CHANNEL.

1951

The first grown-junction transistors are created by Gordon Teal, who grows large crystals of germanium to address the lack of pure, uniform materials for semiconductors. Gordon Teal works with Morgan Sparks to fabricate an n-p-n junction transistor from large single crystals of germanium.


1951

Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, and Patrick E. Haggerty found Texas Instruments, which would go on to be one of the preeminent semiconductor manufacturers and designers.


1954

Morris Tanenbaum designs the first silicon junction transistor at Bell Labs. Previous transistors relied on germanium to function, which had limited use applications due to temperature restrictions and leakage current.


1955

Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derrick accidentally discover oxide diffusion masking, which would later be used in the fabrication of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) devices, one of the most basic building blocks of modern electronics


1955

Jules Andrus and Walter Bond further develop photolithographic techniques developed for making patterns on printed circuit boards to enable precise etching of diffusion “windows” in silicon wafers. This remains the dominant way most chips are made.





1956

SHOCKLEY SEMICONDUCTOR LABORATORY CREATES PROTOTYPE SILICON DEVICES IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA.

1958

JACK KILBY CREATES A MICROCIRCUIT FEATURING ACTIVE AND PASSIVE COMPONENTS DERIVED FROM SEMICONDUCTOR MATERIAL.


1958

MASARU IBUKA AND AKIO MORITA CHANGE THE NAME OF THEIR ELECTRONICS COMPANY TOKYO TSUSHIN KOGYO TO SONY.




1959

Jean Hoerni invents the planar manufacturing process, which revolutionizes semiconductor manufacturing by solving reliability problems of the mesa transistor.



1959

Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng successfully create the first MOSFET, which is the most widely used semiconductor device in the world


1961

SEYMOUR CRAY FUNDS DEVELOPMENT OF THE FIRST SILICON DEVICE TO EXCEED GERMANIUM SPEED.





1963

Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass develop CMOS (complementary MOS), a MOSFET semiconductor device fabrication process at Fairchild Semiconductor.



1964

David Talbert and Robert Widlar at Fairchild introduce the first widely used analog integrated circuit.


1965

Gordon Moore (cofounder of Intel) introduces Moore’s Law, a prediction that the integration rate of LSIs would double every 18 months, implying that it would quadruple in three years and become 1,000-fold denser in 15 years. So far, he’s been right.






1965
SEMICONDUCTOR READ-ONLY-MEMORY CHIPS ARE FIRST MANUFACTURED BY SYLVANIA, OFFERING HIGH DENSITY AND LOW COST PER BIT.



1967

DAWON KAHNG AND SIMON SZE MAKE THE FIRST REPORT ON A FLOATING GATE MOSFET.



1968

Federico Faggin and Tom Klein develop silicon-gate technology for integrated circuits (IC), improving reliability, packing density, and speed of MOS ICs.



1968

Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce leave Fairchild Semiconductor to found Intel in Mountain View, California.







1971

INTEL 4004, THE WORLD’S FIRST SINGLE CHIP MICROPROCESSOR, IS RELEASED.




1971

JOURNALIST DON HOEFLER COINS THE TERM “SILICON VALLEY” IN THE JANUARY 11 EDITION OF WEEKLY TRADE NEWSPAPER ELECTRONIC NEWS.


1971

Dov Froman’s erasable, programmable read-only-memory or EPROM allows for rapid development of microprocessor-based systems.



1974

South Korean electronics company Samsung Group expands into the semiconductor business with its acquisition of Korea Semiconductor.


1977

Apple II, an early personal computer, is released by Apple, using a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor.




1978

John Birkner and H. T. Chua of Monolithic Memories develop programmable array logic (PAL) devices, which implement logic functions in digital circuits. Additionally, users could program PAL devices themselves even after they were manufactured.


1980

Toshiba employee Fujio Masuoka creates Flash Memory, a rewritable semiconductor memory device that is non-volatile



1984

Electrotechnical Laboratory researchers Toshihiro Sekigawa and Yutaka Hayashi demonstrate the first double-gate MOSFET.


1984

Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography, or ASML, is founded in Veldhoven, Netherlands. ASML specializes in the manufacture of photolithography machines used in the production of computer chips and is the only supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines in the world.


1985

Seven former Linkabit employees, including Irwin Jacobs, create a semiconductor, software, and wireless tech company named Qualcomm.


1985

Tensions arise between the US and Japan after the Semiconductor Industry Association and US manufacturers file dumping lawsuits against Japanese semiconductor manufacturers.


1986

Signing of the US–Japan Semiconductor Trade Agreement in September, outlining dumping regulations and increased access to markets in both countries.


1986

Japan surpasses the US and becomes the biggest supplier in the global semiconductor market, thanks in large part to explicit government subsidies.


1987

TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING COMPANY IS FOUNDED BY MORRIS CHANG IN HSINCHU, TAIWAN.





1993

Nvidia, which specializes in graphics processing and system-on-chip units, is founded by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem in California.






1997

FIRST MEETING OF THE WORLD SEMICONDUCTOR COUNCIL IS HELD IN HAWAII.




2000

SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION (SMIC) IS FOUNDED, BASED IN SHANGHAI.



2007

Apple announces the iPhone, a smartphone with few physical features and reliant on touchscreen technology. The iPhone dramatically reshapes the future of smartphones and spawns one of the most successful line of phones in modern history.



2014

The Chinese Government releases “Guidelines to Promote National Integrated Circuit Industry (National IC Plan).” The document outlines a strategy designed to bring China’s semiconductor industry on par with leading international competitors.


2016

Google introduces the Tensor Processing Unit, custom-developed chips used to accelerate machine learning workloads.


2020

Demand exceeds supply due to production blips caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, causing a worldwide global chip shortage. The shortage causes major governments, like the US, EU, and China, to examine the role semiconductors play in their economies and the importance of having local production.


2021

SMIC ANNOUNCES ITS INTENT TO INVEST $8.87 BILLION FOR NEW CHIP PLANT IN SHANGHAI, PART OF CHINA’S PUSH FOR SELF-SUFFICIENCY.




Looking forward...
Farshchi sees a universe of ever-more prominent specialization for semiconductors. There's as of now been some development away from universally useful chips, and toward semiconductors instant for explicit applications like distributed computing, AI, and cell phones, however Farshchi anticipates that this should heighten further.

"I really do see a future where the universally useful processor accomplishes less work," Farshchi said. I do expect there to be more and more specialized tasks that are being done by specialized computers, and I expect those specialized chips to be far more efficient, far cheaper, and far more performing than they otherwise would be if they were general platforms.”