A Brief History of the Semiconductor Industry

Abstract

By the mid-twentieth century, the transistor effect was demonstrated at Bell Labs, but it was the move of W.B. Shockley back to Palo Alto that laid the foundation of the semiconductor industry. Semiconductors, characterized by the fact that the upper conduction band and the valence band, were close to each other demonstrated that this band combination could make the material work as a reasonable conductor and as reasonable insulator under the proper conditions. The MOS technology of the time started with the definition and doping of source and drain followed by the growth of a thin oxide. An MOS transistor easily consumed five times the space of a bipolar transistor. Nonvolatile memory products (NVM) were indeed continuing to grow at Moore's law pace in the 1980s. The effort of Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI) in the first 5 years consisted in exploring any kind of possible device that could operate as a logic or memory element.