Building the Future: The Planar Integrated Circuit

[Recorded: May 8, 2009]
The solid circuits built originally by Jack Kilby established that all the components required to make general-purpose electronic circuits could be fabricated using a common semiconductor material. However, their hand-wired interconnections made them difficult and expensive to produce in high volume.
Seeking to solve reliability problems with transistors at Fairchild Semiconductor, co-founder Jean Hoerni invented a new manufacturing approach: the planar process. Fairchilds Director of R & D, Robert Noyce, realized that the Hoernis process would allow interconnecting multiple transistors on one chip in a batch process that also made them more reliable and lower in cost.
The planar integrated circuit, first created by Jay Lasts team at Fairchild, remains the basis of the modern semiconductor industry and ranks with the printing press, the steam engine, and wireless communications in terms of global social impact. In this lecture, four speakers describe the personal, technical, and business stories associated with bringing Fairchild Micrologic, the first planar integrated circuit family, to market:

Christophe Lécuyer, author of Making Silicon Valley, on Jean Hoerni and his development of the planar process.
Leslie Berlin, author of the biography of Robert Noyce The Man Behind the Microchip, on Noyce and his conception of the planar integrated circuit.
Gordon E. Moore, Fairchild and Intel co-founder and director of R&D on the early days of the industry and the background to the contributions of Hoerni and Noyce.
Jay T. Last, Fairchild co-founder and leader of the Micrologic team on the creative efforts required to turn Noyces concept into a working product.
The lecture is moderated by David Brock, a Senior Research Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation

Catalog Number: 102695009
Lot Number: X5315.2009

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