On December 23, 1947, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley are entered in the history. The three researchers of the Bell laboratories of AT & T, New Jersey, have invented electronics. It all started a long series of experiments of applying an electric current to all kinds of minerals. On this day, the signal passing through a crystal of germanium is pulled with a power that is more important than the entry. The transistor was born.
The base material will be replaced by the silicon. And, ten years later, the American Jack Kilby connected some transistors among themselves to give birth to the first integrated circuit. Europe, it, had the transistron, developed, there is seventy years of age, also by the Germans Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, at Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis).
From there, everything went very quickly in the miniaturization of components the size of a fingernail, or, according to the Americans, a chip (chip) – hence the nickname. The transistor has first replaced the large tube lamps (due to heat a few seconds to turn on) in the old radio stations – who took the name ” transistor “, and then in television sets, amplifiers, hi-fi, etc
Moore’s law
But the accelerator will be given by the american firm Intel, which commercialisa in 1971 the first microprocessor : a single chip full of transistors and capable of executing a computer program.
The boss of Intel, Gordon Moore, set up an empirical law stating that the density of a chip transistors would double every two years. This exponential growth of computing power was inversely proportional to the race to the infinitesimal. About two thousand transistors on the first microprocessor, it is passed, for the same price of manufacture, to more than seventy billion today, each chip being the size of a nanometer. This is the key to…
