As with many inventions, two people had the idea for an integrated circuit at almost the same time. Transistors had become commonplace in everything from radios to phones to computers, and now ...

Julia Kagan is a financial/consumer journalist and former senior editor, personal finance, of Investopedia. Michael Logan is an experienced writer, producer, and editorial leader. As a journalist, he ...

As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. It may surprise you that the microchip that we all know and love today was far from an obvious idea. Some of the paths that were being explored back then to ...

We are used to stories about reverse engineering integrated circuits, in these pages. Some fascinating exposés of classic chips have been produced by people such as the ever-hard-working [Ken Shirriff ...

Sixty years. But how much longer? In 1958 Jack St. Clair Kilby—from Great Bend, Kan.—created one of the greatest inventions, a great bend, in the history of mankind. Kilby recently had started at ...

The formal name of the chip. An integrated circuit (IC) combines thousands, millions or billions of transistors on a single substrate. A certain number of resistors and capacitors may also reside on ...