History of semiconductor materials

The advent of semiconductors takes us back to 1874 when the AC-DC converter was invented. Decades later, Bardeen and Brattain at Bell Laboratories - USA invented the contact transistor in 1947, and Shockley invented the transition layer transistor in 1948. This heralded the arrival of the transistor age. . In 1946, the University of Pennsylvania - USA built the first computer system using vacuum tubes. This computer system is very large in size, it occupies the entire building, and it consumes a large amount of power and generates a lot of heat. After that, the computational transistor was developed, and since then computer technology has progressed by leaps and bounds. In 1956, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded simultaneously to 3 scientists Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain for their contributions to the research and development of the transistor.

The semiconductor industry grew rapidly after the invention of the transistor. In 1957, it exceeded the scale of $100 million. In 1959, bipolar integrated circuits (ICs) were invented by researchers Kilby of Texas Instruments and Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor in the US. This invention had a major influence on the history of semiconductors, and it marked the dawn of the IC era. With their compact size and light weight, the ICs have been widely used in a wide range of electrical equipment.

In 1967, the manufacturer Texas Instruments developed an electronic desktop calculator (calculator) using ICs. In Japan, electronic equipment manufacturers also swapped computers for other computers, and a fierce "computer war" ensued until the late 1970s. ICs improved, and has a larger scale of integration (LSI). Technologies continue to evolve. VLSI components (100,000-10,000,000 integrated components per chip) were developed in the 1980s, and ULSI (more than 10 million electronic components per chip) were developed in the 1990s. In 2000, the LSI system (a multifunction LSI with many functions integrated into a single chip) entered production at any scale. As ICs continue to evolve towards high performance and multi-function, their field of application is expanding. Semiconductors are being used in every corner of society and support our daily lives.