Interconnections in VLSI

For more than a decade after the invention of the transistor in 1948, all semiconductor circuits consisted of discrete devices either connected by wires or mounted on printed circuit boards. Such circuits offered tremendous advantages over the vacuum-tube circuits that they replaced: less power consumption, higher speed, higher reliability, lower cost, less weight and smaller size. In 1958–59, a major technological breakthrough led to the realization of all these advantages for a second time: Working independently, Jack S. Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments, and Robert N. Noyce, a scientist at Fairchild, showed how one could form interconnected transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors and other active and passive components on a single piece of silicon. The resulting “integrated circuits” have revolutionized electronics ranging from radio to computers, and a decade ago these circuits surpassed discrete devices in use by the microelectronics industry. In recognition of their invention, the National Academy of Sciences inducted Kilby and Noyce into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 1982 and 1983, respectively.