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1958 Integrated Circuit Prototypes From Jack Kilby's TI Lab Up For Sale
First time accepted submitter Dharma's Dad writes Christie's New York is auctioning off a 1958 prototype microchip, used by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments in his Nobel Prize-winning invention of putting an integrated circuit onto a single chip. Gifted to one of the lab employees by Kilby, the family has decided to sell it. Estimated at $1,000,000 - $2,000,000, this prototype integrated circuit was built between July 18 and September 12, 1958, of a doubly diffused germanium wafer with flying gold wire and four leads.
I'd say, if it's from 1958, it's ok to call it a microchip.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What's wrong with microchip? I've always preferred it to "computer chip" because so many chips aren't entirely digital.
While Kilby's chip with bondwire interconnect was first, it's interesting that Noyce's concept at Fairchild using Hoerni's planar technology with all interconnect fabricated using the same photolithography as the devices is pretty much how we do it today. Kilby's concept was a technological dead end.
synonymous for me, with IC and monolithic integrated circuit....but then I'm old
pretty much no one says "monolithic" any more because hybrids have pretty much gone the way of the buffalo.
In my experience they are usually called "chips" or "ICs" by people in the industry.
That's a lot of prototypes.
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hybrid integrated circuits are still used in micro and millimeter wave systems
I guess money is no object. I have lots of objects but no money, personally.
$1,000,000 - $2,000,000 for what is basically a transistor?
Wow.
I have some swamp land in Florida you may be interested in.
Is the device still operational after all that time?
Urgh! Stop using that non-word!
given to one of the lab employees, not GIFTED.
Please, let's not let this Farmville jargon take over the net, including Slashdot. Nothing was 'gifted' unless it had certain special qualities. Things are given, not gifted.
Language changes. But not because fucking Zynga made a game.
At Texas Instruments, an integrated circuit was called a "bar", not "chip" or "die", partly because that's what Jack called them. Wafers were called "slices", so your multiprobe yield was expressed in "good bars per slice". They finally dropped the Texas jargon in the mid-'80s when it became obvious that it was a silly affectation in the face of industry-standard terminology and an obstacle to communicating clearly with vendors and customers.
Bet it don't work anymore.
Around here, in the 1960, there were even wackier terms for what we call integrated circuits today.
Ezekiel 23:20
Nice to see people appreciate the history. Hope it eventually ends up in a museum somewhere alongside the firsts from Noyce, BBS, et al.
Centuries from now the history of civilization may divided into periods BIC and AD (Before Integrated Circuits and Anno Digital TM)
That's probably because you work near DC.
The federal government must really hate microwaves, then.
Ezekiel 23:20
ICs weren't invented for the space industry, but it is from the space and military industries that the transistor and IC manufacturers received a lot of their initial funding. For both the space and military industries the high costs of transistors and ICs was justified by their space, weight and energy-use savings along with their heat resistance. For business and consumers the benefits didn't justify the costs.
If is wasn't for the space and military industries the development of transistors and ICs would probably have been slower.
Source: Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics
Two guesses...
1. Microchip is a brand name. Calling an IC a Microchip is like calling a moving staircase an Escalator.
2. "Microchip" sounds like a disagreeably small snack. Quite the contrary, they are quite filling.
The real path to male liberation
Yes, it's your assumption that before NASA's application of ICs to compact computer design, ICs were not a solution looking for a problem. In fact, they were.
Ezekiel 23:20
To restate it in Moore's law terms, for the first few years after the invention of ICs, the complexity for minimum component costs was exactly 1 transistor per chip. ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm assuming Stan Lee took credit for Jack Kirby's integrated circuit. Excelsior!
Dark Reflection
From the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of "gift" as a verb:
2. To bestow as a gift; to make a present of. Const. with to or dative. Also with away. Chiefly Sc.
1619 J. Sempill Sacrilege Sacredly Handled 31 If they object, that tithes, being gifted to Levi, in official inheritance, can stand no longer than Levi [etc.].
a1639 J. Spottiswood Hist. Church Scotl. (1677) v. 278 The recovery of a parcel of ground which the Queen had gifted to Mary Levinston.
1711 in A. McKay Hist. Kilmarnock (1880) 98 This bell was gifted by the Earl of Kilmarnock to the town of Kilmarnock for their Council~house.
1754 J. Erskine Princ. Law Scotl. (1809) i. 51 Where a fund is gifted for the establishment of a second minister, in a parish where the cure is thought too heavy for one [etc.].
1801 A. Ranken Hist. France I. 301 Parents were prohibited from selling, gifting, or pledging their children.
1829 J. Brown New Deeside Guide (1876) 19 College of Blairs..having been gifted to the Church of Rome by its proprietor.
1836 A. Alison Hist. Europe V. xlii. 697 Thus did Napoleon and D'Oubril..gift away Sicily.
1878 J. C. Lees Abbey of Paisley xix. 201 The Regent Murray gifted all the Church Property to Lord Sempill.
I'm not sure when Zynga was founded, but I'm pretty sure it was after 1619.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
1. Because brand name generalization is so uncommon.
Putting more than one transistor on a single die was an inevitable result of improvements in semiconductor process technology. There should NEVER have been a patent for that obvious step (or the single-chip microprocessor, or much of anything else in the 75 years).
I dunno, maybe I'm old, but "microchip" doesn't seem all that wacky to me.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So what kind of circuit is it?
I assume it is BJT based?
Despite the accolades, Kilby's proper place in history is unclear to me. Because of its reliance on wire bonding, his design was not scalable to large numbers of transistors. The "planar" design at Fairchild was the future because its "wires" were produced by the same process that made the transistors. It seems clear that somebody was going to recognize that if you could make one transistor on a piece of germanium by a chemical engineering process, you could make two, and stick them together with little gold wires. Forgive me but I don't see the Nobel prize in that. The genius of "planar" was that it didn't end with the limitations of bonding pads.
Yes, it runs Minux
Table-ized A.I.
1. So pretty normal then.
I got a portable radio for christmas 1967, it had nine transistors. I took it apart and counted them just to be sure.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Factually correct, but doesn't answer the question of "Why not?" We do it all the time. We xerox documents. We google for results. And besides, it is already too late .
Wafers were called "slices", so your multiprobe yield was expressed in "good bars per slice".
Did they ever refer to the process of wafer testing "Looking for Mr. Goodbar?"
Halfway there wasn't really any way there. The Fairchild Planar Process was the real breakthrough but Kilby had the broad patent claims on something commercially unworkable.
http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/ki...
"What's wrong with microchip?"
How quickly memory fades. It was regarded as a dumb-ass conflation of micro-circuit and chip. An IC should be called a chip. Just chip, no micro- in front. Micro-chip implies that there are much larger full sized chips, which is nonsense. Also a "micro" was a microprocessor, so a micro chip might be an 8085 or Z80, but not all chips were micros.
Then as now, nerds were sticklers for precision in language.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
OP complained about use of the word "gifted," claiming it was derived from Farmville jargon. This is factually incorrect and demonstrably false. I have never heard "gifted" in the context of Farmville or any other Zynga game until this Slashdot discussion. I have, however, heard it many times in normal English usage, used in ways similar to the examples given by the OED.
Just because OP is not familiar with the English word, which predates Zynga by centuries, does not mean that all modern usage derives from Zynga, which appears to be what you are arguing.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson