Overview

In July 1958, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments suggested building all of the components of a circuit completely in silicon [1]. By September 12, 1958, Kilby had built a working model of the first "solid circuit," the size of a pencil point. A couple of months later in January 1959, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor developed a better way to connect the different components of a circuit [2], [3]. Later, in the spring of 1959, Fairchild Semiconductor demonstrated the first planar circuit a "unitary circuit." The first monolithic integrated circuit (IC) was born, where multiple transistors coexisted with passive components on the same physical substrate [4]. Microphotographs of the first IC (Texas Instruments, 1958), the first monolithic IC (Fairchild Semiconductor, 1959), and the recent high performance dual core Montecito microprocessor (Intel Corporation, 2005) are depicted in Fig. 1.1.

Fig. 1.1: Microphotographs of the first integrated circuit (IC) and first monolithic IC along with a high performance, high complexity IC (the die size is not to scale). (a) The first IC (Texas Instruments, 1958), (b) the first monolithic IC (Fairchild Semiconductor, 1959), and (c) the high performance dual core Montecito microprocessor (Intel Corporation, 2005)

In 1960, Jean Hoerni invented the planar process [5]. Later, in 1960, Dawon Kahng and Martin Atalla demonstrated the first silicon based MOSFET [6], followed in 1967 by the first silicon gate MOSFET [7]. These seminal inventions resulted in the explosive growth of today's multibillion dollar microelectronics industry. The fundamental cause of this growth in...