Microchip

The microchip, or integrated circuit, has been the basic building block of scientific and technological progress since the second half of the 20th century. Its invisible powers have been an enormous boon to business almost from the start.

First created in 1958, the chip has launched space missions, modernised corporations, revolutionised world trading and, through progressive miniaturisation, put power that was once the province of room-sized supercomputers into a smartphone that can fit in the palm of a hand.

Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce, co-founder of Intel (short for Integrated Electronics), are jointly credited with coming up with the integrated circuit, by different means, at about the same time.

The transistor had appeared a decade earlier, an invention at Bell Labs that could finally replace the bulky and expensive vacuum tubes used in electronics in the first half of the century.

That transistors and their circuit boards would quickly be superseded by microchips in importance shows the pace of innovation in the latter half of the last century.

Ever more complex electrical circuits were being designed for the transistor, but soldering components and wires together proved expensive in time and money, while connections were prone to failure.

Kilby and Noyce figured out that components and wires could be made from one material – silicon – and shaped as well as combined together on a single chip.

The modern process known as photolithography “prints” chip designs on silicon wafers as ultraviolet light is passed through stencils, or masks, that detail the circuitry.

The latest chips from Intel have circuit widths of just 22 billionths of a metre and, while Intel’s first microprocessor in 1971 had 2,250 transistors, 6m of them from 22-nanometre chips could now fit on the full stop at the end of this sentence.

The benefits for business are tangible – and highly visible. The chip powers the personal computer, the tablet and the smartphone that have become the main tools of employees. It is at the heart of the servers that run the internet, store our data and carry out ecommerce transactions.

More powerful computing is making it increasingly possible for businesses to predict weather patterns, make energy discoveries, develop more effective drugs and analyse their sales and customer behaviour for the “big data” clues to their future success. In little more than half a century, the chip has become the very heart of business.

Chris Nuttall