The microchip, now found in every home and office, in devices from cookers to computers, credit cards to traffic lights and cars to mobile phones, is 50 years old today.

The first working microchip, or integrated circuit, was demonstrated at Texas Instruments by one of the company’s newest employees, Jack Kilby, on September 12, 1958.

It consisted of a strip of germanium with one transistor and other components all glued to a glass slide.

In July that year Kilby had not been allowed to go on holiday because he had only just joined the company.

Times Archive, 1958: Electronic Computer Exhibition

The display comprises the largest collection of computer devices ever assembled

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He used the time to try to solve the problem of how to connect up a large number of electronic components in elaborate circuits in a cost-effective and efficient way.

He realised that all the components could be made from the same semiconducting material (in the first chip germanium, but these days silicon) and could be created in situ to form a complete circuit.

His rough device, measuring seven 16ths of an inch (11.5 millimetres) by one 16th of an inch, revolutionised electronics, and the world.

The microchip virtually created the modern computer industry, and the internet would be unthinkable without it. Modern communications, transport, medicine, manufacturing and commerce are all based on the remarkable processing power of microchips.

Jim Tully, chief of research at the technology analyst Gartner, said: “Integrated circuits are so woven into our lives that it would be hard to imagine a world without them. The integrated circuit is the engine of the information age.”

This year the semiconductor industry will produce more than 267 billion integrated circuits. That number is predicted by Gartner to rise to 330 billion in 2012.

Over the years, microchips have become much smaller but the true revolution has been in the number of transistors that can now be put on to a chip. A transistor is a tiny switch indicating the 1s and 0s on which computing is based. By the late 1960s microchips had hundreds of transistors on them. By the late 1980s they had hundreds of thousands of transistors on them. Intel, the world’s leading chip manufacturer, unveiled a microprocessor chip, codenamed Tukwila, this year that has more than two billion microscopic transistors on it.

The key to the success of the microchip is that the cost of manufacturing them has remained low because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit. At the same time their performance is high because the components switch quickly and consume little power.

The growth of the complexity of microchips has consistently followed a formula invented in 1965 by Gordon Moore, then chairman of Intel, who said that complexity would double every two years. While many have predicted the demise of “Moore’s Law” over the years, there is no sign of it failing yet.

Small miracles

— If a house shrank at the same pace that transistors have, you would not be able to see the house without a microscope Integrated circuits were first used commercially in computers for the American Air Force in 1961

— Jack Kilby, inventor of the first working integrated circuit, went on to create the first hand-held calculator and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000

— Intel has 15 silicon wafer manufacturing plants. Each costs about $3 billion to build and they are claimed to be the cleanest spaces on Earth

Source: Times Database

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