Страница 47 из 155
When his boss, Willis Adcock, returned from vacation he was not fully persuaded that this would be practical. There were other things for the lab to do that seemed more pressing. But he made Kilby a deal: if he could make a working capacitor and resistor, Adcock would authorize an effort to do a complete circuit on a single chip.
All went as pla
It was not the most elegant device. In the models that Kilby built that fall of 1958, there were a lot of tiny gold wires co
In March 1959, a few weeks after filing for a patent, Texas Instruments a
The Texas Instruments a
NOYCE’S VERSION
There are often different paths to the same i
Jean Hoerni, a Fairchild physicist who was one of the traitorous eight, came up with an ingenious fix. On the surface of a silicon transistor, he would place a thin layer of silicon oxide, like icing atop a layer cake, that would protect the silicon below. “The building up of an oxide layer . . . on the surface of the transistor,” he wrote in his notebook, “will protect the otherwise exposed junctions from contamination.”6
The method was dubbed “the planar process” because of the flat plane of oxide that sat on top of the silicon. In January 1959 (after Kilby had come up with his ideas but before they were patented or a
The role of patent lawyers is to protect good ideas, but sometimes they also stimulate them. The planar process became an example of this. Noyce called in John Ralls, Fairchild’s patent lawyer, to prepare an application. So Ralls began grilling Hoerni, Noyce, and their coworkers: What practical things could be done with this planar process? Ralls was probing to obtain the widest range of possible uses to put in the patent application. Recalled Noyce, “The challenge from Ralls was, ‘What else can we do with these ideas in terms of patent protection?’ ”8
At the time, Hoerni’s idea was merely designed to build a reliable transistor. It had not yet occurred to them that the planar process with its tiny windows could be used to permit many types of transistors and other components to be etched onto a single piece of silicon. But Ralls’s persistent questioning got Noyce thinking, and he spent time that January batting around ideas with Moore, scribbling them on a blackboard and jotting them into his notebook.
Noyce’s first realization was that the planar process could eliminate the tiny wires that stuck out of each layer of the transistor. In their place, little copper lines could be printed on top of the oxide layer. That would make manufacturing the transistors faster and more reliable. This led to Noyce’s next insight: if you used these printed copper lines to co
Noyce was a talkative bundle of energy and Moore was a taciturn yet insightful sounding board, and they played off each other well. The next leap was easy: the same chip could also contain various components, such as resistors and capacitors. Noyce scribbled on Moore’s blackboard to show how a small section of pure silicon could serve as a resistor, and a few days later he sketched out how to make a silicon capacitor. The little metal lines printed on the oxide surface could integrate all of these components into a circuit. “I don’t remember any time when a light bulb went off and the whole thing was there,” conceded Noyce. “It was more like, every day, you would say, ‘Well, if I could do this, then maybe I could do that, and that would let me do this,’ and eventually you had the concept.”9 After this flurry of activity he wrote an entry in his notebook, in January 1959: “It would be desirable to make multiple devices on a single piece of silicon.”10
Noyce had come up with the concept of a microchip independently of (and a few months later than) Kilby, and they had gotten there in different ways. Kilby was trying to solve the problem of how to overcome the tyra
PROTECTING DISCOVERIES
Patents present an inevitable source of tension in the history of invention, especially so in the digital age. I