Integrated Circuits

Miniaturization of electronic circuits was a frequent topic of discussion in the late 1950s, especially in the U.S. armed services because of their needs for compact, lightweight electrical equipment. But it took the inventive genius of electrical engineer Jack Kilby to come up with a practical way to achieve this goal. On July 24, 1958, he penned a prophetic entry into his Texas Instruments logbook: "Extreme miniaturization of many electrical circuits could be achieved by making resistors, capacitors and transistors & diodes on a single slice of silicon."

By September Kilby had built and operated a phase-shift oscillator on a chip of germanium having a transistor, capacitor and the resistors on it, linked by gold wires. This crude prototype oscillated at 1.3 MHz, demonstrating that integrated circuits were indeed achievable. That autumn Kilby began refining his designs and working with Jay Lathrop to adapt the techniques of photolithography for defining intricate circuit elements in chips of both germanium and silicon.

That same year Jean Hoerni invented the planar manufacturing process at Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation in California. In January 1959, while thinking about other possible uses for this process, Robert Noyce conceived another way to fabricate integrated circuits. "In many applications," he wrote, "it would be desirable to make multiple devices on a single piece of silicon in order to be able to make the interconnections between them as part of the manufacturing process." Noyce's distinctive approach used fine aluminum lines deposited directly upon the silicon-dioxide protective layer to connect circuit elements defined in the underlying silicon by Hoerni's planar process. Fairchild scientists and engineers under Gordon Moore quickly began working out the many details of manufacturing such an integrated circuit.

By 1961 both companies had silicon integrated circuits ready for market- TI's family of Solid Circuits and Fairchild's Micrologic series. At first, however, the only customers interested were the armed forces and other companies supplying them lightweight electronics and computers. The Air Force's Minuteman program was an important driving force, as was NASA's Apollo project later that decade.

In producing these integrated circuits, both companies used bipolar junction transistors impregnated into silicon by diffusion processes. At Fairchild, meanwhile, a group of researchers that included Bruce Deal, Andrew Grove, Chih-Tang Sah, and Ed Snow began addressing the problems of manufacturing metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) field-effect transistors, which had been invented at Bell Labs and further developed at RCA. One of the big problems they faced was the stability of these transistors; they eventually solved it by depositing a thin silicon nitride layer atop the silicon dioxide and scrupulously eliminating any sources of sodium ions in the microchip manufacturing process. By the decade's end, MOS transistors were beginning to displace bipolar transistors in many integrated circuits.

It was Moore who envisioned the immense potential that integrated circuits held for electronics. He began a far-sighted article in the April 1965 issue of Electronics by stating,” The future of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself." Moore foresaw a day in the not-too-distant future when that integrated circuits would permeate home computers, portable communications devices, and automobile control systems. Since the number of circuit components on a microchip had grown from ten to about fifty in only four years, he boldly extrapolated this exponential growth for another decade and predicted that integrated circuits would contain 65,000 components by 1975. This prediction, which has come to be known as Moore's Law, turned out to be true; it has governed the explosive growth of the semiconductor industry ever since.

Exercise 5

Give synonyms to the following words.

1. miniature (adj)	10. use (n)
2. frequent (adj)	11 techniques (n)
3. late (adj)	12. indeed (adv)
4. require (v)	13 probable (adj)
5. equipment (n)	14. conceive (v)
6. goal (n)	15. manufacture (n)
7. achieve (v)	16. fine (adj)
8. link (v)	17. quickly (adv)
9. demonstrate (v)	18. contain (v)

Exercise 6

Make up general questions to the text.

LESSON 13

Exercise 1

Translate the following words paying attention to word-building affixes.

Respond, response, irresponsible, responding, responsibility, corresponding, correspondent, correspondingly, initial, initialise, initialised, initialisation, initials, initially, observation, observe, observable, observance, observant, observational, observer, observatory, announce, announced, announcer, announcing, announcement, encourage, encouragement, courage, courageous, encouraged, encouraging, pursue, pursuit, pursuer, lumen, luminescent, luminescence, luminosity, luminous, bright, brightness, brighter, attempt, attempting, attempted, curious, curiosity, curiously.

Exercise 2

Translate the following paying attention to infinitives.

1. Companies are obliged to shareholders to produce products and profits, which makes it difficult for them to sponsor research at the expense of their core businesses. 2. The new services will have to be attractive and useful for customers to be willing to pay for them by the megabyte. 3. The list includes blue, green, and white light-emitting diodes and blue and violet semiconductor lasers, which are supposed to revolutionise first digital video players and then perhaps laser printers. 4. It is the first such substrate to emerge from any laboratory in quantities sizable enough to be used in a full-scale testing program. 5. A lifetime of at least 10 000 hours is assumed to be needed for the devices if they are to be commercially successful. 6. It remains to be seen whether this approach will find a niche or be superseded by the rapid advance of blue-laser development. 7. The first generation system required a directional antenna to be installed on the subscriber’s premises within sight of a base station antenna. 8.Each element is fed a version of the signal to be transmitted that differs from the others only by its amplitude and phase. 9.The numbers seem to indicate that we have a way to go before serious demand for high-speed Internet access develops among wireless users. 10. To set up a network in a four-story hotel four base stations were required, plus considerable testing to decide on that number and on where to place the base stations for complete coverage. 11.At a first glance, Web-based shopping seems to have benefits for both the consumer and the environment. 12. Above all, NASA wanted the crew to have the flexibility to work around last-minute problems manually. 13. While concerned about the risks most space experts agreed that further waiting would be unlikely to reduce risks.14.Naturally, qualification requirements are expected to evolve as test equipment and procedures become available. 15. It is of course not permissible to increase the analyser’s sensitivity to set the two tones back to the reference level. 16. Two diodes are considered to have been selected in a pair if their forward resistance coincide in three points (in the three sub-bands) to within 5%. 17. It turned out to be possible to measure a reflection coefficient of 0.06 to an accuracy of about 10%. 18. So far, the only motherboard maker to admit to the problem is ABIT Computer Corp. and the only major PC maker to acknowledge being affected is IBM Corp. 19. But the problem is likely to be more widely spread. 20. To remain competitive globally, however, European semiconductor suppliers will need more than one fab not only to expand the capacity but also to have a local presence in key developing markets. 21.A laptop PC is an example of a visible technology; we expect it to fail and so we perform daily routines such as backing up files in anticipation of its failure.

Exercise 3

Match Ukrainian translations to the following English phrases.

1. interface	1. плoский телеекран
2. light-emitting diode	2. фосфат галiю
3. flat-panel television display	3. заднi габаритнi лiхтарi
4. dramatically altered	4. напилення у рідкiй фазi
5. gallium phosphide	5. вуличне свiтлове табло
6. chemical-vapor deposition	6. iнтерфейс (межа мiж двома шарами)
7. gallium-arsenide substrate	7. хiмiчне нанесення (нашарування) у паровiй фазi
8. liquid-phase epitaxy	8. свiтловипромінювальні дiоди
9. taillights	9. галiй-арсенiдова підкладка
10. outdoor lighting display	10. докорiнно змiнив

Exercise 4

Pay attention to translation of the following phrases.

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