Integrated Circuit

Hello there. You probably don’t see me very often, but I am inside almost everything you use that plugs in or has a battery. My name is the Integrated Circuit, but most people just call me a microchip. I am the tiny, powerful brain that makes your world work. But before I came along, the world of electronics was a world of giants. Imagine a computer so big it filled an entire room, from the floor all the way to the ceiling. This was the reality in the 1950s. These giant machines were powered by thousands of glass parts called vacuum tubes. They looked like little light bulbs, and they got incredibly hot and burned out all the time. When one of them broke, the whole giant computer would stop working. These computers were slow, clumsy, and took a lot of energy to run. Scientists and engineers knew there had to be a better way. They needed something smaller, faster, more reliable, and much, much cooler to power the future they dreamed of.

My story begins with two brilliant minds working in different places but on the same big problem. First, there was a quiet engineer named Jack Kilby who worked at a company called Texas Instruments. During the summer of 1958, when many of his coworkers were on vacation, the factory was quiet, giving him plenty of time to think. He had a revolutionary idea. What if all the different electronic parts—the resistors, the capacitors, the transistors—could be made from the very same piece of material? It was a wild thought, but he was determined to try. He carefully crafted a small sliver of a material called germanium, connecting the parts with tiny gold wires. On September 12th, 1958, he gathered his bosses and showed them his creation. He flipped a switch, and a wave of light appeared on a screen. I worked. The first integrated circuit had been born. A few months later, in early 1959, another genius named Robert Noyce had a similar idea at his company, Fairchild Semiconductor. He thought of an even better way to build me. Instead of using germanium and messy wires, he realized I could be made from a slice of silicon, and the connections could be printed right onto me. This made me much stronger and, most importantly, much easier to make lots of. It was like one person invented the car, and the other invented the assembly line to build millions of them. I was born from the combined genius of these two amazing inventors.

My arrival was quiet at first, but it started a revolution. Because of me, electronics began to shrink. The room-sized computers became desk-sized, then lap-sized, and now, they fit right into your pocket. I was the tiny brain that powered the first handheld calculators, making math homework a little bit easier for students everywhere. I was in the digital watches that told people the time with bright numbers instead of moving hands. I was even a hero in space. In 1969, I helped guide the Apollo spacecraft safely to the Moon and back. It was a giant leap for humankind, and I was proud to be part of it. Today, I am everywhere. Billions of my descendants are in your smartphones, your video game consoles, your televisions, and even your family's car. I help you talk to friends far away, learn new things online, and explore incredible new worlds. Looking back, I see that even though I am so small you can barely see me, I helped the world connect and dream in bigger ways than ever before.