4) Marvelous Ideas from the Planar IC

  
Picture A (left): Robert Noyce, who invented the Planar IC
Picture B (right): The first commercial IC fabricated by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1961

When the wheels of time make huge turns, perhaps by invisible forces, people will inevitably head towards that direction.
The year after Jack Kilby announced his fundamental idea of the IC in the Southern Midwest of the United States, Fairchild Semiconductor, a newly founded company on the west coast created the planar technologies, which are the basic technologies for modern IC.

The fundamental idea of the technology was to stabilize the device operation by covering the entire silicon chip surface excluding the electrode areas by silicon dioxide (SiO2) film with stable characteristics.

This technology, although invented by Jean Hoerni (also in the same company), the individual responsible for applying it to IC was Noyce, who was also one of the central figures in founding Fairchild Semiconductor. The excellent part of Noyce's idea was that the SiO2 film did not just act as a film to protect the surface, it also played the role of formation of elements and inter-element connections and allowed for higher-level integration on the IC.

Regarding the technology, Noyce started with, “I wondered what would happen if we put one transistor next to another.” He then frankly described, “The surface of the wafer covered by oxidized film would be mechanically and chemically stable, and it would be possible to connect the device electrodes by metal inter-connects formed by vapor deposition on the film.” “Well, not just two, but a multitude of transistors could be formed on a single chip, meaning that we should be able to create complex circuits.”

Picture A: Robert Noyce, at the time he invented the planar IC.
Picture B: The first IC commercialized by Fairchild in 1961. (Micrologic Series Flip-Flop Circuit)

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