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The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution Kindle Edition
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateDecember 18, 2007
- File size1.1 MB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Satisfying as both biography and basic science text, the book perfectly captures the independence and near-obsessive problem-solving talents of the two men. Though ultimately only one of them (Noyce) ended up with legal rights to the invention, they shared a respect for each other that persisted throughout their careers. Since Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work, the story is all the more compelling and intriguing over 40 years after the invention. Reid's work uncovers human dimensions we'd never expect to see from 1950s engineering research. --Rob Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE MONOLITHIC IDEA
The idea occurred to Jack Kilby at the height of summer, when everyone else was on vacation and he had the lab to himself. It was an idea, as events would prove, of literally cosmic dimensions, an idea that would be honored in the textbooks with a name of its own: the monolithic idea. The idea would eventually win Kilby the Nobel Prize in Physics. This was slightly anomalous, because Jack had no training whatsoever in physics; the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was willing to overlook that minor detail because Jack's idea did, after all, change the daily life of almost everyone on earth for the better. But all that was in the future. At the time Kilby hit on the monolithic idea-it was July 1958-he only hoped that his boss would let him build a model and give the new idea a try.
The boss was still an unknown quantity. It had been less than two months since Jack Kilby arrived in Dallas to begin work at Texas Instruments, and the new employee did not yet have a firm sense of where he stood. Jack had been delighted and flattered when Willis Adcock, the famous silicon pioneer, had offered him a job at TI's semiconductor research group. It was just about the first lucky break of Jack Kilby's career; he would be working for one of the most prominent firms in electronics, with the kind of colleagues and facilities that could help a hard-working young
engineer solve important problems. Still, the pleasure was tempered with some misgivings. Jack's wife, Barbara, and their two young daughters had been happy in Milwaukee, and Jack's career had blossomed there. In a decade working at a small electronics firm called Centralab, Kilby had made twelve patentable inventions (including the reduced titanate capacitor and the steatite-packaged transistor). Each patent brought a small financial bonus from the firm and a huge feeling of satisfaction. Indeed, Jack said later that the most important discovery he made at Centralab was the sheer joy of inventing. It was problem solving, really: you identified the problem, worked through 5 or 50 or 500 possible approaches, found ways to circumvent the limits that nature had built into materials and forces, and perfected the one solution that worked. It was an intense, creative process, and Jack loved it with a passion. It was that infatuation with problem solving that had lured him, at the age of thirty-four, to take a chance on the new job in Dallas. Texas Instruments was an important company, and it was putting him to work on the most important problem in electronics.
By the late 1950s, the problem-the technical journals called it "the interconnections problem" or "the numbers barrier" or, more poetically, "the tyranny of numbers"-was a familiar one to the physicists and engineers who made up the electronics community. But it was still a secret to the rest of the world. In the 1950s, before Chernobyl, before the Challenger rocket blew up, before the advent of Internet porn or cell phones that ring in the middle of the opera, the notion of "technological progress" still had only positive connotations. Americans were looking ahead with happy anticipation to a near future when all the creations of science fiction, from Dick Tracy's wrist radio to Buck Rogers's air base on Mars, would become facts of daily life. Already in 1958 you could pull a transistor radio out of your pocket-a radio in your pocket!-and hear news of a giant electronic computer that was receiving signals beamed at the speed of light from a miniaturized transmitter in a man-made satellite orbiting the earth at 18,000 miles per hour. Who could blame people for expecting new miracles tomorrow?
There was an enormous appetite for news about the future, an appetite that magazines and newspapers were happy to feed. The major breakthroughs in biology, genetics, and medicine were still a few years away, but in electronics, the late fifties saw some marvelous innovation almost every month. First came the transistor, the invention that gave birth to the new electronic age-and then there was the tecnetron, the spacistor, the nuvistor, the thyristor. It hardly seemed remarkable when the venerable British journal New Scientist predicted the imminent development of a new device, the "neuristor," which would perform all the functions of a human neuron and so make possible the ultimate prosthetic device-the artificial brain. Late in 1956 a Life magazine reporter dug out a secret Pentagon plan for a new kind of missile-a troop-carrying missile that could pick up a platoon at a base in the United States and then "loop through outer space and land the troops 500 miles behind enemy lines in less than 30 minutes." A computer in the missile's nose cone would assure the pinpoint accuracy required to make such flights possible. A computer in a nose cone? That was a flight of fancy in itself. The computers of the 1950s were enormous contraptions that filled whole rooms-in some cases, whole buildings-and consumed the power of a
locomotive. But that, too, would give way to progress. Sperry-Rand, the maker of UNIVAC, the computer that had leaped to overnight fame on November 4, 1952, when it predicted Dwight Eisenhower's electoral victory one hour after the polls closed, was said to be working on computers that would fit on a desktop. And that would be just the beginning. Soon enough there would be computers in a briefcase, computers in a wristwatch, computers on the head of a pin.
Jack Kilby and his colleagues in the electronics business-the people who were supposed to make all these miracles come true-read the articles with a rueful sense of amusement. There actually were plans on paper to implement just about every fantasy the popular press reported; there were, indeed, preliminary blueprints that went far beyond the popular imagination. Engineers were already making their first rough plans for high-capacity computers that could steer a rocket to the moon or connect every library in the world to a single worldwide web accessible from any desk. But it was all on paper. It was all impossible to produce because of the limitation posed by the tyranny of numbers. The interconnections problem stood as an impassable barrier blocking all future progress in electronics.
And now, on a muggy summer's day in Dallas, Jack Kilby had an idea that might break down the barrier. Right from the start, he thought he might be on to something revolutionary, but he did his best to retain a professional caution. A lot of revolutionary ideas, after all, turn out to have fatal flaws. Day after day, working alone in the empty lab, he went over the idea, scratching pictures in his lab notebook, sketching circuits, planning how he might build a model. As an inventor, Jack knew that a lot of spectacular ideas fall to pieces if you look at them too hard. But this one was different: the more he studied it, the more he looked for flaws, the better it looked.
When his colleagues came back from vacation, Jack showed his notebook to Willis Adcock. "He was enthused," Jack wrote later, "but skeptical." Adcock remembers it the same way. "I was very interested," he recalled afterward. "But what Jack was saying, it was pretty damn cumbersome; you would have had a terrible time trying to produce it." Jack kept pushing for a test of the new idea. But a test would require a model; that could cost $10,000, maybe more. There were other projects around, and Adcock was supposed to move ahead on them.
Jack Kilby is a gentle soul, easygoing and unhurried. A lanky, casual, down-home type with a big leathery face that wraps around an enormous smile, he talks slowly, slowly in a quiet voice that has never lost the soft country twang of Great Bend, Kansas, where he grew up. That deliberate mode of speech reflects a careful, deliberate way of thinking. Adcock, in contrast, is a zesty sprite who talks a mileaminute and still can't keep up with his racing train of thought. That summer, though, it was Kilby who was pushing to race ahead. After all, if they didn't develop this new idea, somebody else might hit on it. Texas Instruments, after all, was hardly the only place in the world where people were trying to overcome the tyranny of numbers.
The monolithic idea occurred to Robert Noyce in the depth of winter-or at least in the mildly chilly season that passes for winter in the sunny valley of San Francisco Bay that is known today, because of that idea, as Silicon Valley. Unlike Kilby, Bob Noyce did not have to check with the boss when he got an idea; at the age of thirty-one, Noyce was the boss.
It was January 1959, and the valley was still largely an agricultural domain, with only a handful of electronics firms sprouting amid the endless peach and prune orchards. One of those pioneering firms, Fairchild Semiconductor, had been started late
in 1957 by a group of physicists and engineers who guessed-
correctly, as it turned out-that they could become fantastically rich by producing improved versions of transistors and other mechanical devices. The group was long on mechanical talent and short on managerial skills, but one of the founders turned out to have both: Bob Noyce. A slender, square-jawed man who exuded the easy self-assurance of a jet pilot, Noyce had an unbounded curiosity that led him, at one time or another, to take up hobbies ranging from madrigal singing to flying seaplanes. His doctorate was in physics, and his technical specialty was photolithography, an exotic process for printing circuit boards that required state-of-the-art knowledge of photography, chemistry, and circuit design. Like Jack Kilby, Noyce preferred to direct his powerful intelligence at specific problems that needed solving, and he shared with Kilby an intense sense of exhilaration when he found a way to leap over some difficult technical obstacle. At Fairchild, though, he also became fascinated with the discipline of management, and gravitated to the position of director of research and development. In that job, Noyce spent most of his time searching for profitable solutions to the problems facing the electronics industry. In the second half of the 1950s, that meant he was puzzling over things like the optimum alloy to use for base and emitter contacts in double-diffuse transistors, or efficient ways to passivate junctions within the silicon wafer. Those were specific issues involving the precise components Fairchild was producing at the time. But Noyce also gave some thought during the winter of 1958-59 to a much broader concern: the tyranny of numbers.
Unlike the quiet, introverted Kilby, who does his best work alone, thinking carefully through a problem, Noyce was an outgoing, loquacious, impulsive inventor who needed somebody to listen to his ideas and point out the ones that couldn't possibly work. That winter, Noyce's main sounding board was his friend Gordon Moore, a thoughtful, cautious physical chemist who was another cofounder of Fairchild Semiconductor. Noyce would barge into Moore's cubicle, full of energy and excitement, and start scrawling on the blackboard: "If we built a resistor here, and the transistor over here, then maybe you could . . ."
Product details
- ASIN : B000XU4UT4
- Publisher : Random House
- Accessibility : Learn more
- Publication date : December 18, 2007
- Edition : Revised
- Language : English
- File size : 1.1 MB
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 322 pages
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307432032
- Page Flip : Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #521,767 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #43 in Business & Management Technology History
- #59 in Digital Design (Books)
- #256 in Company Histories
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

T. R. Reid is a longtime correspondent for The Washington Post and former chief of its Tokyo and London bureaus as well as a commentator for National Public Radio. His books include The United States of Europe, The Chip, and Confucius Lives Next Door.
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Customers find the book highly readable with a writing style that makes it an enjoyable fast read. Moreover, the technical explanation is praised for its ability to explain complicated subjects, and customers appreciate the detailed history of the invention of the microprocessor. Additionally, the pacing receives positive feedback, with one customer noting its well-separated chapters, and customers find the book engaging.
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Customers find the book highly readable, with its writing style and language making it an enjoyable fast read.
"...Very interesting and well written." Read more
"This is an interesting and important book about two men who changed the world...." Read more
"...The book is easy to read (at times, perhaps too easy as it is lacking some technical details) and insightful...." Read more
"...he's gotten just the right length and level of detail to keep it very interesting...." Read more
Customers praise the book's technical explanation, noting its ability to break down complicated subjects and provide detailed information.
"...and insightful. I've enjoyed reading the chip a lot...." Read more
"This book is very insightful especially for those young people who were not around at the turn of the 20th century for the invention of the light..." Read more
"...worth reading both for laypersons interested in technique and specialists in the field...." Read more
"...begins with the discovery of the Edison effect and carefully explains the various technologies in a non-technical way as it goes along...." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's historical content, particularly its detailed coverage of the invention of the microprocessor and electronic parts, with one customer noting it provides a complete discussion of electronics from the 19th century.
"It was a very good history of the invention of the microprocessor and the different stages of it...." Read more
"Beautiful book, I learn a lot on the microship technology story... i reconmend to any engineering computer student this book." Read more
"Good history that is well written and easy to read. I wish it had more drama and suspense that would have made this book more interesting." Read more
"...When I see these stories, it really inspires and motivates me." Read more
Customers appreciate the pacing of the book, with one mentioning its well-separated chapters and another noting its organized structure.
"...The book consists of 11 different chapters, each covering an area in the history of the microchip...." Read more
"...good history of the invention of the microprocessor and the different stages of it...." Read more
"...Very detailed, well separated chapters. Great for students and teachers of electronics." Read more
"...Even if you have no technology backgroun. Great book, organized properly and well written with simple terms anyone can understand, this one takes..." Read more
Customers find the book engaging, with one mentioning it's enjoyable for both techies and another describing it as an entertaining tour.
"...Those issues aside, the book is very engaging, and the author does a superb job of explaining difficult technical material to non-techies." Read more
"...The text is in an easy to understand format that should be enjoyable to both techies and nintechies alike." Read more
"Quick and entertaining tour..." Read more
Reviews with images

The book is so poorly printed. Just unreadable. I can’t understand how such a book got shipped out.
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2025Format: KindleVerified PurchaseEvents of this book is critical for late 20th century technology breakthrough.
I always wanted to be that place where things take place ,I witnessed some part, in my own profession I found that chance, I was there. When I see these stories, it really inspires and motivates me.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2023Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseHistory leapt ahead during the time Reid was creating the original version of this book, and this revision trips over some details of the technology that has been accelerating since before Kilby and Noyce’s arrival at the plate.
Lots of emphasis on bipolar device history and function, necessary to the story but a much smaller piece of the broader scope of a world today based almost entirely on field effect technology, for much the same reasons that Reid cites as the little recognized driver for the development of integrated devices.
Indeed, the first patents for solid state devices were for three terminal field effect constructs, back as far as 1926, long before bipolar constructs were significant outside the theoretical study of solid state properties.
The effect of the DARPA VLSI challenge that led directly to Lynn Conway and Carver Mead’s breakthrough methodology (still the basis of chip design today) specifically addressed another deeper “tyranny of numbers” that threatened to stall the pace of integrated circuit progress, the problem of keeping the organization and understanding of so many elements straight.
The task of soldering all those connections perfectly is gravy compared to trying to be certain that everything is connected to the right node. Organizing and vetting proper function of the integration itself began to be a problem as soon as the first masks were produced.
CMOS, PMOS and NMOS processes were already in use when Reid’s first edition was published, and I would guess some of the revisions in the current version were made to try to reflect a better sense of the full-on arrival of field effect technology that likely was originally missed.
(Witness the embarrassing mislabeling of bipolar NPN structures with the wrong NFET equivalents, collector-base-emitter replaced with source-gate-drain, the order flipped, a common enough confusion that usually doesn’t last. But hey - a base is not a gate. It works differently, more like a bus having only one driver, but each one carries lots of passengers.)
All in all, a pretty good bunch of important historical perspective; having been there through most of it, working with all of it professionally, it was a fun retrospective. (Kilby and Noyce were a bit before my time, but I was aware of who they were and what they were trying to do as my career got legs.)
Recommended, a good place to start gathering the bigger picture of how that little gizmo came to be planted so firmly in everyone’s everyday life, with only a few hiccups that won’t mislead in any important way. —TR
- Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2012Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThe Chip is a smallish (300 pages) book about the history of the microchip which has lead to miniaturization of circuits that lead to the revolution of the personal computer. The book is easy to read (at times, perhaps too easy as it is lacking some technical details) and insightful. I've enjoyed reading the chip a lot.
The book consists of 11 different chapters, each covering an area in the history of the microchip. The first chapter starts with the invention of "the monolith idea" which is the concept that we integrate all the components on one circuit instead of wiring up different smaller and smaller components. Both Bob Noyce and Jack Kilby had this idea at around the same time and both of them are recognized as the inventor of the chip. The second chapter quickly introduces the history of electronics and the invention of the transistor... all the things that happened before before the monolith idea, the basis for the idea. Chapter 3 is the history of Jack Kilby and chapter 4 is the history of Bob Noyce (nicely done). Chapter five discusses the patent case about whether Noyce or Kilby is the first inventor and how this never really got resolved. Chapter 6 introduces computers and explains how the chip was perfect for making digital computers. Chapter 7 shows how the space race actually provided the demand for the microchips, as there wasn't enough industrial interest yet due to the price. Chapter 8 tells about how (again) Jack Kilby assisted with the invention of the handheld calculator that was the first introduction of the chip to the larger public. Chapter 9 is a bit an odd chapter, it explains how a calculator works. Chapter 10 talks about the Japanese microchip industry threatening the American and how Bob Noyce led the industry to improve quality in manufacturing that kept the US in the forefront of the industry. Chapter 11 is a closing chapter about what happened to Bob Noyce and Jack Kliby after all that.
As I said, I started this book as another book in the history of computers, but I found myself quickly very interested in the book and spend longer reading sessions on it than usual and finished it actually rather quickly. It feels well researched, it is an easy read and well balanced the details of the particular invention with all the surrounding developments. I would recommend it to anyone who want to know anything about where chips came from and how they influence the world. Excellent book and recommended reading.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2010Format: KindleVerified PurchaseI got into the electronic business in 1954 when it was all vacuum tube and I worked in electronics until 2001. I was there and saw it all as an electronic technician working with all the parts and am more that aware of the numbers problem. We fought assembly problems for years with all the wiring necessary to make all the circuits. I worked with aircraft electronics for 13 years and then in industry for 38 years in data storage systems, magnetic tape and magnet disk, floppy and rigid. Even when we went from vacuum to solid technology it still required massive wiring and we used automatic back panel wire wrapping machines, (Ditmaco). Not until the invention of the microchip did this problem go away. The invention of the first integrated circuits was a major step but we still had the wiring problem. The microchip solved the wiring problem. As I am reading this book (The Chip) it sure brings back a lot of memories, especially trying to over come the interconnect problems. I was there and saw it all from leaded parts to surface mount, from vacuum tubes to transistors, to integrated circuits to microchips. I am very familiar with the early Fairchild and Texas Instrument parts. The Fairchild 9000 series and the T.I. 7400 series. I was an interesting enviroment and now I am enjoying reading the story.
Top reviews from other countries
- AlbertReviewed in India on June 29, 2025
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written .
Format: KindleVerified PurchaseFantastic book. Provides great insights about many prominent personalities and events.
Must read!
Beautifully written. It keeps us engaged throughout.
- Amazon CustomerReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 10, 2014
5.0 out of 5 stars This is a nice piece of industrial and technical history
Format: HardcoverVerified PurchaseThis is a nice piece of industrial and technical history. It was interesting to see how people reacted to things back then when before chips and society evolved into so much more.
One person found this helpfulReport -
PepitoReviewed in Spain on March 4, 2016
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastico
Format: KindleVerified PurchaseSoy un fan de los microprocesadores. Creo que son el equivalente a la rueda y el vapor. Muy detallado libro sobre los inicios y desarrollo de ellos a lo largo del tiempo.
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Ralf GruetznerReviewed in Germany on June 11, 2014
5.0 out of 5 stars Sehr hilfreich
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseSteht drin was drauf steht. Eine sehr informative Lektüre zu dem Thema!!
leider nur auf Englisch, aber dass wusste man ja vorher.
- Bill, in BCReviewed in Canada on May 21, 2016
5.0 out of 5 stars Want to know how microprocessors work, and were invented? This is the right book.
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseExcellent, well worth reading. Not overly technical.
One person found this helpfulReport