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It's often said that technology moves quickly, I'm actually of the opinion that its our learning of how to utilise technology that actually grows rapidly.
The invention of certain pieces of technology are transformative, so much so that in the initial stages we struggle to grasp its potential. Then over time the realisation of whats possible grows and more and more applications materialise.
The World Wide Web was one of those technological jumps forward, and Artificial Intelligence will undoubtedly, if it isn't already, be another notable point in history. However I believe the true giant leap forward is often not talked about as much as it should be since it underpins everything that has come since and kick started a revolution that has lasted 75+ years.
That giant leap forward was the invention of solid state electronics.
Triodes to Transistors
The early building block of electronics was the vacuum tube triode. These devices had applications across radar, radio, television and many other spheres. However they were large and power angry devices making it difficult to use them reliably in increasingly complex devices.
The key to the miniaturisation of electronics was the invention of the field effect transistor. The theory behind these devices was first formulated in the 1920s, but it wasn't until the late 1940s that the first practical examples were built.
Many different scientists independently discovered and worked on the transistor concept, however William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain are widely credited with its invention. In the late 1950s at Bell Laboratories they first produced the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (MOSFET).
These transistors had many applications, once of which was being able to act as a "digital" switch, with this the era of the semiconductor and solid state electronics was born.
Printing with Light
Once the MOSFET had been invented the next challenge related to developing techniques for reliably being able to manufacturer them whilst also being able to continue their miniaturisation. The ability to produce transistors at a smaller size would enable them to be more densely packed as well as reducing power consumption.
The idea of photolithography, using light to print patterns into materials, had been around for some time. But in the late 1950s Jules Andrus at Bell Laboratories looked to use similar techniques to build solid state electronics (Moe Abramson and Stanislaus Danko of the US Army Signal Corps are also credited with inventing similar techniques in the same period).
Using this technique a semiconductor substrate is covered with a material called photoresist. A mask is then placed over the top such that only certain areas of the material are exposed to a light source. The exposed areas go through a chemical change that renders them either soluble or insoluble in a developer solution depending on the type of photoresist that is used. Finally the material then goes through an etching process to leave the desired pattern of the semiconductor based components.
Typically now Ultra Violet light is used in the process, but much of the drive for ever smaller and smaller transistors was driven by using ever decreasing wavelengths of light in the photolithography process.
Moore's Law
Gordon Moore was an American engineer who originally worked at Schokley Semiconductor Laboratory, a company founded by William Schokley the co-inventor of the transistor. He would latter go on to be a founder member of both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.
In 1965 while working at Fairchild Semiconductor he was asked what he thought might happen to semiconductor technology over the next ten years. His answer to that question would eventually come to be known Moore's Law.
Put simply Moore's Law states that the number of transistors that can fit into a given size of integrated circuit (or "chip") will double roughly every two years.
Originally Moore predicted this would be the case for ten years, however remarkably it has continued to hold for at least 55 years with industry voices only in the last couple of years starting to question if we may now be starting to reach the limit of Moore's original prediction.
The fact the industry has been following Moore's law for so long has been a major driver in continually increasing processing power that has been a catalyst for innovation. It is now believed that the transistor is the most widely manufactured device in human history. In 2018 it was believed as many as 13 sextillion (13 followed by 21 zeros) had been manufactured.
The lives of virtually every human on the planet has been touched by solid state electronics and the technologies it underpins. It is fair to say that the birth of solid state electronics marked the birth of our technological age and changed the world forever. Of all the transformative technologies that have come since, and will continue to be developed in the future, I don't believe any will be as impactful as this initial giant leap forward.
