Word: silicon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Fairchild, Noyce used a new chemical etching method not only to print transistors on silicon wafers but also to lay down tracks between them. Besides eliminating expensive wiring, the new integrated circuits operated much faster. Six months earlier Texas Instruments' Jack Kilby had produced a similar chip, but it was made of germanium, required external wires and was tougher to manufacture. Noyce's chip won the ensuing patent race, but the two friendly rivals were content to regard themselves as co-inventors...
This is the century that split the atom, probed the psyche, spliced genes and cloned a sheep. It invented plastic, radar and the silicon chip. It built airplanes, rockets, satellites, televisions, computers and atom bombs. It overthrew our inherited ideas about logic, language, learning, mathematics, economics and even space and time. And behind each of these great ideas, great discoveries and great inventions is, in most cases, one extraordinary human mind...
Today plastic is nearly everywhere, from the fillings in our teeth to the chips in our computers (researchers are developing flexible transistors made of plastic instead of silicon so they can make marvels such as a flat-panel television screen that will roll like a scroll up your living-room wall). Plastic may not be as vilified now as it was in 1967, but it's still a stuff that people love and hate. Every time a grocery clerk asks, "Paper or plastic?," the great debate between old and new, natural and synthetic, biodegradable and not, silently unfolds...
...content with his lot at Bell Labs, Shockley set out to capitalize on his invention. In doing so, he played a key role in the industrial development of the region at the base of the San Francisco Peninsula. It was Shockley who brought the silicon to Silicon Valley...
...February 1956, with financing from Beckman Instruments Inc., he founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory with the goal of developing and producing a silicon transistor. He chose to establish this start-up near Palo Alto, where he had grown up and where his mother still lived. He set up operations in a storefront--little more than a Quonset hut--and hired a group of young scientists (I was one of them) to develop the necessary technology. By the spring of 1956 he had a small staff in place and was beginning to undertake research and development...