Jack Kilby died last Monday. If you don't know who I'm talking about, hie thee off and read up. Jack Kilby is the person who developed the integrated circuit back in 1958, precipitating a whole revolution in computing.
In case you don't know, an integrated circuit is a circuit in which all the components are formed in the same piece (or "chip") of silicon or other semiconductor material. Originally, circuits were built out of individual components connected together with wires, making them bulky and error prone. Forming the components and the wires all in the same chip was the first step toward the extreme miniaturization that's made it possible to pack millions of transistors into the CPU of your computer and made chips small enough to pack into just about everything. This also made possible my microfabrication class where we hung out in the clean room and tried to make integrated circuits on wafers.
As an exercise, why not walk around your house and count the items that have chips in them?
I've counted thirty-two items so far and (Oh, the remotes! That's another five, no, six.) I keep finding more.
194 words | June 22, 2005 08:20 PM | Wired