The Materiality of Microelectronics

This study advocates for ‘materials-centered’ accounts in the history of technology, and presents such an analysis for the early history of microelectronics. Innovations in semiconductor crystal production were central to the emergence of solid state electronics and the dynamics of the early semiconductor industry. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Bell Telephone Laboratories developed novel techniques for growing semiconductor single crystals. These crystal-making techniques were scaled up at Texas Instruments for the production of silicon transistors, and thereby underwrote the firm’s rise as a dominant manufacturer of silicon devices. Shockley Semiconductor, a West Coast start-up, sought to gain a competitive advantage in the silicon device business by developing a new technique for producing silicon crystals. The failure of this strategy contributed to the disintegration of the firm, with several key staff members leaving to establish Fairchild Semiconductor. Learning from Shockley’s failure, Fairchild Semiconductor developed a low-cost single crystal production capability that allowed it to introduce two milestone microelectronic devices: the double-diffused planar transistor and the integrated circuit.