Transistors were the successors to the vacuum tube technology which dominated the electronics industry through the mid-1950s.  Following the invention of transistors, engineers began to design more complex electronic circuits with a variety of components.  In order to improve the performance of the electronics, more components were necessary. At the time, this meant that thousands components had to be connected by hand soldering a bunch of wire.  This was expensive, time-consuming, and faulty.

Jack Kilby realized that the resistors and capacitors used to make electronic circuits could be made from the same material and interconnected in a single circuit and thus, he built the first successful integrated circuit made of germanium in 1958 at Texas Instruments.  Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductors built an integrated circuit on silicon in 1960 and along with Kilby is considered a co-inventor of the integrated circuit. Silicon is the most popular material for semiconductors today and Noyce’s design was overall more suited to mass production.  Noyce was also one of the co-founders of Intel, one of the largest manufacturers of integrated circuits in the world.

In the late 1950s, Gordon Moore noticed that transistor density (as in the number of transistors) on integrated circuits was doubling each year. Moore eventually condensed these observations into Moore’s Law, which charts a progression of growth in transistor density eventually leading to exponential increase and thus an exponential increase in processor speed. So far, Moore’s Law has proven to be accurate.

The first uses of the newly invented integrated circuit were fairly select. Texas Instruments, the company where Jack Kilby worked, developed a handheld calculator using the technology. The military and space exploration agencies also made use of the integrated circuit.

Silicon Valley arises out the silicon chip manufacturers within the area because most semiconductors are made from silicon. The 1980s brought widespread use of the term Silicon Valley because of the IBM personal computer that used the chip as well as many semiconductor companies in the surrounding area. Silicon Valley is now the home of many technology giants as well as thousands of small start ups aiming to make a considerable impact.

Division of labor: Each group member summarized about two pages of the text.