High Performance Power Distribution Systems

Abstract

In July 1958, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments suggested building all of the components of a circuit completely in silicon [1]. By September 12, 1958, Kilby had built a working model of the first “solid circuit,” the size of a pencil point. A couple of months later in January 1959, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor developed a better way to connect the different components of a circuit [2], [3]. Later, in the spring of 1959, Fairchild Semiconductor demonstrated the first planar circuit — a “unitary circuit.” The first monolithic integrated circuit (IC) was born, where multiple transistors coexisted with passive components on the same physical substrate [4].