The tyranny of numbers
Computers with thousands of transistors had millions of soldered joints, and any of them could fail. Kilby made transistors, resistors and a capacitor in a single piece of germanium. Noyce worked out how to create both components and connections on a silicon wafer at once with a photographic process.
From space to pocket
The first big customers were NASA (the Apollo guidance computer) and the military. Prices fell quickly and chips moved into calculators, watches and eventually every device. Noyce later co-founded Intel.
How a chip is made
Patterns are projected with light onto a silicon wafer through masks, then etched and layered. The most advanced fabs use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light from machines made by Dutch company ASML, the only maker of such equipment in the world.