Word: germanium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...horribly slow and unlikely to get much faster given that transistors and other components had to be wired together by hand. Enter Kilby, a newly hired engineer at Texas Instruments, who followed a hunch that you could eliminate some of the wires by sticking transistors onto a sliver of germanium--a close cousin of silicon--and etching circuits onto this crystal "chip," which was about half the size of a paper clip. Many of his peers dismissed such a simple solution as naive, and his microchip "provided much of the entertainment at major technical meetings over the next few years...