Biography | Robert Noyce — The Notebook Page That Put Metal Lines on Hoerni's Glass

Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments built a working integrated circuit in Dallas in 1958. Noyce's contribution, written in this building, was a way to manufacture one. On 1 December 1957 Jean Hoerni entered the planar process in his Fairchild notebook: leave the silicon dioxide on the wafer to protect the junctions instead of etching it away. He took the idea to Fairchild's patent lawyer on 14 January 1959 and filed on 1 May 1959. A working planar transistor existed by March. Nine days after that lawyer meeting, on 23 January 1959, Noyce wrote his own notebook entry under a heading about isolating multiple devices. The insight was simple once Hoerni's oxide was sitting there. The glass was an insulator. Metal could be evaporated onto it and patterned like a printed circuit, connecting transistors, diodes, and resistors that had been built in the same chip. Fairchild filed U.S. patent 2,981,877, "Semiconductor Device-and-Lead Structure," on 30 July 1959. The patent issued on 25 April 1961, not 1960, the year that still circulates in some summaries. Kilby had filed on 6 February 1959. The two inventions shared the idea of many components in one semiconductor body. They differed on the wires. Kilby's first device used bonded gold wires. Noyce's used deposited metal on oxide. The companies fought. The men did not. Both are credited as co-inventors of the integrated circuit. Noyce's version is the one that scaled. Jay Last's group turned the idea into Fairchild Micrologic in 1960. From that point the industry's problem was no longer how to connect a handful of transistors. It was how many would fit. The IEEE milestone plaque in front of this building names both Hoerni's process and Noyce's circuit. Stand at the stele and you are at the address, not inside the original lab. The lab work happened in rented rooms behind that façade. Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Noyce in 1959 with a motherboard, the year of the notebook entry.