60th Anniversary of the Transistor: How Far We’ve Come
60th Anniversary of the Transistor: How Far We’ve Come
December 11, 2007: On the 16th of December most people will be thinking about it only being nine more sleeps until Christmas, what isn’t so well known is that it will also be the day the humble transistor turns 60.
While the transistor doesn’t sound like much, all those fancy technological gadgets going underneath the Christmas tree and even the computer you’re reading this article with owe a lot to the semiconductor device. Intel has lavish plans to celebrate the electronic icon’s birthday, though it’s expected to be more of a showcase of the processing manufacturer’s new 45 nanometre chip technology and less that of a history lesson.
Intel’s focus on the transistor does raise an interesting point though, as in just 60 years, with the greater chunk coming in the latter 20th century, we’ve advanced an incredible distance and have gone from shipping 5mb hard drives the size of small elephants around in airplanes to being able to fit eight hundred times more storage in the palm of your hand.
When you consider that Intel’s market leading position over AMD is based on the success of microchips with millions of tiny transistors on them, it’s no wonder that the birthday is significant.
Moore’s Law
The year was 1965 when one of Intel’s co-founders, Gordon E. Moore published a paper in Electronics Magazine that described how the number of transistors that could be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit was growing exponentially, and was in effect doubling every two years.
Given that the paper was published in the same year the first American troops started exchanging fire with the natives in Vietnam and the Prime Ministers of Northern and Southern Ireland met for talks for the first time in four decades, you’d be forgiven for failing to miss the publication.
However in the world of IT the observation and subsequent prediction that the trend of transistor growth would continue was a groundbreaking one and still holds true today. The trend has proven so accurate that the term ‘Moore’s Law’ is now a staple in the semi-conductor industry and has been a solid marketing platform for Intel for the company’s entire history.
Although most of your time will no doubt be spent in a furor of Christmas parties, caroling with thousands of other people who don’t know how to hold a tune and being inundated with images of overweight red-suited men, spare a thought for the birthday of the transistor as you’re likely to have billions of them around your house without ever realising it.
A modern day processor with 410 million transistors next to the first ever transistor radio which had only four.