Happy 50th birthday to the silicon chip

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The integrated circuit, more commonly known as the silicon chip, celebrates its 50th birthday this Friday.

It revolutionised electronics by making devices much cheaper to manufacture and helped to create the modern computer industry we have today.

Such chips enabled great cost reductions and transformed room-sized machines into today’s mainframes, personal computers and laptops. It has also been used in devices such as mobile phones, digital cameras and music players.

The integrated circuit was created in 1958 by Jack Kilby, who was working at Texas Instruments at the time. He came up with the idea that you could put the elements of an electronic circuit onto a silicon chip.

Transistors could be packed into smaller spaces, making it possible to allow thousands or millions of wires to connect the transistors and other devices at the same time.

Jim Tully, Gartner analyst and vice president, said that silicon chips have now become part of our everyday lives and are now woven into society, making it hard to visualise a world without integrated circuits.

“If we didn’t have integrated circuits we wouldn’t have the internet, PCs, mobile phones, iPods - TV wouldn’t be quite the thing we see it as being – we certainly wouldn’t have flat panel TV’s,” he said. “Wherever you look technologies are built on integrated circuits.”

The future for the integrated circuits looks to be its use with medical applications - diagnostic equipment but also technology that is embedded into bodies, semiconductor technology merged with biology.

Tully described devices such as scanners, pacemakers and hearing aids which have enhanced lives and integrated circuits have made possible.

The sale of integrated circuits is still a huge money spinning industry, growing at ten per cent for the last few decades. In 2008, around $270 billion (£152 billion) worth will be sold globally.

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