The World’s Biggest ChipĬomputer designer Gordon Bell once noted that getting the highest speed possible in computers-which rely entirely on ICs-is often about "plumbing and packaging." Since integrated circuits get hotter the faster they run, fast computers have to worry about keeping their chips cool. Special chemicals are applied before and after to allow this and the process is repeated until a sandwich, made up of many layers, has been built up and the IC is finished and ready for packaging. Light (often ultraviolet) is blasted through a stencil with the patterns IC designers want burned into the chip. The basic process that has allowed this is photolithography, which, if you break it down into its Greek origins means “writing on stone with light.” Figure 1 below shows the general idea. It took a long time to get there, but the progress was steady: since Fairchild Semiconductor chemical engineer Gordon Moore first wrote about ICs in 1965, roughly every 18–24 months the number of transistors on an integrated circuit has doubled. Sixty years later, the hot consumer product is a voice activated smartphone connected to the "world brain" of the internet-science fiction only a generation ago. In the early days of ICs, for example, one of the earliest products was the basic four-function 1973 Sears/Bowmar handheld calculator. You could see this change in spacecraft, aviation, communications, and, most obviously for most of us, in the consumer products of their times. Since Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby’s coinvention of the IC in 1958-59, relentless improvements in transistor density have taken place. The IC itself is a silicon sandwich made up of many transistors (little switches) wired together into electrical circuits. The silicon chip, or integrated circuit (IC), is one of humankind’s most magnificent, complex, and transformative creations.
0 kommentar(er)
