Up Close with Kilby and Moore
I’d just tucked into dessert when Dick Muldoon, the Labs’ director of communications, dropped by to invite me to a meeting which I assumed would be a routine briefing with some corporate bigwigs. You can imagine my surprise when, a few moments later, I found myself at a table with one other journalist, shaking hands with Jack Kilby, one of the pioneers of the integrated circuit, and Gordon Moore (yes, that Gordon Moore). Caught completely by surprise, I exchanged pleasantries while I struggled to come up with something even remotely intelligent to ask these two legendary individuals.
Following what felt like an uncomfortably long pause, I managed to come up with a single question, one that had been kicking around in my mind during my drive up to the Labs that morning: “How much of the creation of the transistor was based on a skillful extrapolation of what we knew at the time, and how much of its success was the result of unanticipated developments and a healthy dose of good luck?”
I can’t remember who spoke first, but I do remember the quiet smiles they exchanged before telling me that, while they did have a good idea of what they were looking for, there had also been a surprising amount of luck involved. According to Mr. Moore, that luck came in the form of four fateful decisions, three of which I’ll talk about at some other time.
While all four choices played important roles in how the transistor changed the history of humanity, the decision to focus on silicon as the primary material for making them may have been the most impactful of the four—and certainly the most mysterious.
The original transistor was an “ungainly assemblage of germanium, plastic, and gold, topped off by a squiggly spring.” However, most researchers soon began devoting most of their efforts to using silicon to make bipolar and, eventually, field-effect-type transistors.
Silicon: The Material of Choice
Kilby and Moore agreed that several other candidate materials seemed equally promising, but, in retrospect, silicon possessed several unique characteristics that they weren’t aware of at the time. Among the most significant of these were silicon’s chemical properties, which made it amenable to relatively straightforward photolithographic manufacturing processes that enabled the development of monolithic integrated circuits by Kilby, Noyce, and other pioneers a decade later.
Mr. Kilby chimed in, saying that that the invention of the transistor was pretty much inevitable, but the explosive growth made possible by silicon was not. “It was almost as if silicon was waiting for us,” added Moore, noting that even he was initially surprised at its ability to support the steadily increasing circuit densities that enabled him to make his fortune with Intel.
