Very-large-scale integration

The history of the transistor dates to the 1920s when several inventors attempted devices that were intended to control current in solid-state diodes and convert them into triodes.

Success came after World War II, when the use of silicon and germanium crystals as radar detectors led to improvements in fabrication and theory.

With the invention of the first transistor at Bell Labs in 1947, the field of electronics shifted from vacuum tubes to solid-state devices.

[2] The invention of the integrated circuit by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce solved this problem by making all the components and the chip out of the same block (monolith) of semiconductor material.

Subsequent advances added more transistors, and as a consequence, more individual functions or systems were integrated over time.

Current technology has moved far past this mark and today's microprocessors have many millions of gates and billions of individual transistors.

But the huge number of gates and transistors available on common devices has rendered such fine distinctions moot.

Certain high-performance logic blocks, like the SRAM (static random-access memory) cell, are still designed by hand to ensure the highest efficiency.