Background & history

History

October 15, 2026

The Machines Behind the Chip: The History of Semiconductor Equipment Makers

Without equipment manufacturers, the modern chip industry could not exist. From early diffusion furnaces and testing instruments to Nikon steppers, Applied Materials deposition tools, Lam plasma etchers, KLA inspection systems and ASML EUV lithography: the history of Tokyo Electron, Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, ASML, Ebara, Therma-Wave and many other suppliers shows how specialized equipment made billions of transistors manufacturable.

October 15, 2026

From Fairchild to TSMC: The History of Semiconductor Companies

From Bell Laboratories and Texas Instruments through Fairchild, Intel, and AMD to the memory manufacturers of Japan and South Korea: the history of semiconductor companies is also the history of new business models. TSMC, Arm, ASML, and NVIDIA show how research, design, fabrication, and equipment manufacturing developed into a global industry.

October 15, 2026

Beyond Silicon: The History of Compound Semiconductors

While silicon came to dominate microelectronics, compound semiconductors opened up entirely new possibilities. From Heinrich Welker’s early III–V research and tunable band gaps to heterostructures, quantum wells, and modern epitaxy, these materials laid the foundations for semiconductor lasers, LEDs, high-frequency transistors, and GaN and SiC power devices.

October 14, 2026

Chip Design and EDA: How Hand-Drawn Layouts Became Billions of Transistors

Early integrated circuits were based on hand-drawn mask layouts. With Mead and Conway, standard-cell libraries, Verilog, VHDL, and automated logic synthesis, the design process changed fundamentally. The history of EDA explains how complex chips can now be designed without drawing billions of transistors individually.

October 13, 2026

Mishaps in Semiconductor History: When Tiny Errors Have Major Consequences

Five faulty entries in a Pentium division table, microscopic tin whiskers bridging contacts, an unintentionally triggered thyristor inside a CMOS chip, and individual radiation particles flipping memory bits: semiconductor history also includes astonishing failures. What caused them—and how did they change the reliability of modern electronics?

October 13, 2026

The History of the Bipolar Transistor

In 1947, Bell Laboratories demonstrated that signals could be amplified using a germanium crystal. Only Shockley’s idea of a transistor with two pn junctions, followed by new methods of crystal growth, doping, and surface passivation, turned this discovery into a dependable mass-produced device. The story runs from germanium junction transistors through TTL and operational amplifiers to modern SiGe RF devices.

October 13, 2026

Europe’s Forgotten Transistor: the Transistron

In 1948, German physicists Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker independently developed a working germanium point-contact transistor in a laboratory near Paris. Their “Transistron” was even used in the French telephone network. Why did this European parallel invention become almost forgotten?

October 13, 2026

From Rectifiers to SiC and GaN: The History of Power Semiconductors

From the crystal rectifier of the nineteenth century through thyristors, power MOSFETs, and IGBTs to silicon carbide and gallium nitride: how semiconductors learned to switch high currents and voltages efficiently—and transformed industrial drives, electrical grids, electric vehicles, and modern power supplies.

October 13, 2026

The Battle for the Memory Chip: Japan, Korea, and the United States

Memory chips became one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the semiconductor industry. The United States led the early DRAM era, Japan overtook the market in the 1980s through manufacturing quality and scale, and South Korea later rose to dominance with Samsung and its rivals. The struggle over memory shaped industrial policy, trade conflicts, and the technological path from DRAM to NAND flash and today’s HBM for AI systems.

October 13, 2026

Ever Larger Wafers: Why 300 Millimeters Prevailed

From a few centimeters in diameter to today’s 300 mm wafers: over several decades, the semiconductor industry enlarged its silicon discs in order to produce more chips in a single manufacturing run. The transition to 300 mm promised lower unit costs, but it also required new crystal-growing systems, process tools, cleanroom automation, and enormous capital investment. Why did this particular format prevail—and why did the next step to 450 mm fail to arrive?

October 13, 2026

From CCD to CMOS Sensor: How Silicon Changed Photography

From scientific image sensors and early digital cameras to smartphone photography: the history of electronic imaging is closely tied to silicon. What began with the CCD at Bell Labs eventually led to CMOS image sensors with billions of pixels produced every year.

October 13, 2026

The History of the Semiconductor Laser: From the Laboratory to the Internet

In 1962, researchers achieved laser emission directly from a semiconductor for the first time. Yet only heterostructures, new crystal-growth processes and low-loss optical fibers turned laser diodes into reliable light sources. Their development led from laboratory pulses lasting a few nanoseconds to the first optical telephone links, transoceanic data cables and modern data centers.

October 13, 2026

From Bell Labs to the Solar Industry: The History of the Silicon Solar Cell

In 1954, three Bell Laboratories researchers presented the first practical silicon solar cell. What began as a possible power source for remote telephone equipment first found its major market in space, before improved manufacturing processes, new cell architectures, and global mass production turned photovoltaics into a pillar of modern electricity generation.

October 13, 2026

From 3D Accelerator to AI Processor: The History of the GPU

From 3dfx and GeForce through programmable shaders and CUDA to Tensor Cores and chiplet GPUs: How the graphics processor evolved from a gaming accelerator into an engine of artificial intelligence.

October 13, 2026

Two Inventors, One Idea: The Birth of the Integrated Circuit

In 1958, Jack Kilby demonstrated that an entire electronic circuit could be built in a single piece of semiconductor material. Robert Noyce and the team at Fairchild then used the planar process to lay the foundation for the modern chip industry.

October 12, 2026

How Eight Engineers Helped Create Silicon Valley

In 1957, eight young scientists left the laboratory of transistor co-inventor William Shockley. Their new company, Fairchild Semiconductor, advanced the planar process and integrated circuits—and became the starting point for numerous chip companies, including Intel and AMD.

October 12, 2026

From Wire Bond to Chiplet: The History of Semiconductor Packaging

How simple wire connections evolved into highly complex multi-die systems—and why packaging can now be just as important as transistor fabrication.

October 12, 2026

Microchips Behind the Iron Curtain: The History of East Germany’s Semiconductor Industry

From the first transistors in Teltow to chip factories in Frankfurt (Oder) and Erfurt and Dresden’s megabit memory: why East Germany achieved so much technically yet continued to fall behind economically.

October 12, 2026

How Taiwan Became a Global Chip Powerhouse

From technology transfer with RCA to the founding of TSMC and the rise of the foundry model: how Taiwan changed the rules of the semiconductor industry.

September 14, 2026

Why Do n-Channel and p-Channel Transistors Exist?

Electrons are faster than holes – so why do we need p-channel transistors at all? The answer leads directly to CMOS and the fundamental principle behind virtually every modern digital chip.

September 14, 2026

The History of the FET

34 years between the patent and the first functional device – followed by three completely different physical implementations of the same basic principle.

September 14, 2026

From Germanium to Silicon

Germanium was faster, easier to purify and cheaper to manufacture – why it nevertheless lost to silicon, and where it is making a comeback today.

September 14, 2026

The History of Semiconductor Memory

From SRAM’s six-transistor cell and Dennard’s one-transistor DRAM to EPROM, EEPROM, Flash and 3D NAND.

September 14, 2026

The History of Chip Manufacturing

Planar technology, photolithography, ion implantation and CMP – the four invisible fundamental technologies without which no modern chip could be made.

September 14, 2026

The Development of the Microprocessor

From the Intel 4004 calculator chip and the x86 accident of the IBM PC to ARM’s triumph in the smartphone era.

September 14, 2026

The Race for the Smallest Transistor

Why node names such as “3 nanometers” have long since become marketing, how Intel lost its lead, and what comes after the Gate-All-Around transistor.

September 14, 2026

The Most Important Semiconductor Materials

Si, Ge, GaAs, GaN, SiC, InP: Why there is no single best semiconductor material, but a different one for every application.

September 14, 2026

Moore’s Law – and Why It Is Getting Harder

Dennard scaling, the power wall, FinFET and GAAFET – why every decade required an entirely new physical invention to keep Moore’s Law alive.

September 14, 2026

EUV Lithography – The Most Complex Machine in the World?

Tin droplets in a vacuum, mirrors instead of lenses, and only one manufacturer worldwide – why EUV lithography systems became the bottleneck of the chip industry.

September 14, 2026

Why the Blue LED Was So Difficult

Bandgap physics, a material without a suitable substrate, and a hydrogen barrier that prevented p-type gallium nitride for years.

September 14, 2026

The History of the LED

From a forgotten discovery in 1907 through Holonyak’s red LED and the white phosphor LED to the global lighting revolution.

September 14, 2026

Pioneers of Semiconductor Technology

From the idea of the field-effect transistor to the blue LED – the most important pioneers of semiconductor technology and their stories.

September 14, 2026

From PNP to CMOS: Why Semiconductor Logic Took Its Own Path

Why PNP came before NPN, PMOS before NMOS – and why CMOS, despite its advantages, took forty years to become the standard.