In July 1958, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments suggested building all of
the components of a circuit completely in silicon [1]. By September 12,
1958, Kilby had built a working model of the first “solid circuit,” the
size of a pencil point. A couple of months later in January 1959, Robert
Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor developed a better way to connect
the different components of a circuit [2], [3]. Later, in the spring of
1959, Fairchild Semiconductor demonstrated the first planar circuit —
a “unitary circuit.” The first monolithic integrated circuit (IC) was
born, where multiple transistors coexisted with passive components
on the same physical substrate [4]. Microphotographs of the first IC
(Texas Instruments, 1958), the first monolithic IC (Fairchild Semiconductor,
1959), and the recent high performance dual core Montecito
microprocessor (Intel Corporation, 2005) are depicted in Fig. 1.1.
In 1960, Jean Hoerni invented the planar process [5]. Later, in 1960,
Dawon Kahng and Martin Atalla demonstrated the first silicon based
MOSFET [6], followed in 1967 by the first silicon gate MOSFET [7].
These seminal inventions resulted in the explosive growth of today’s
multi-billion dollar microelectronics industry. The fundamental cause
of this growth in the microelectronics industry has been made possible
by technology scaling, particularly in CMOS technology.
The goal of this chapter is to provide a brief perspective on the development
of integrated circuits (ICs), introduce the problem of power
distribution in the context of this development, motivate the use of
on-chip decoupling capacitors, and provide guidance and perspective
to the rest of this book. The evolution of integrated circuit technology
from the first ICs to highly scaled CMOS technology is described in Section
1.1. As manufacturing technologies supported higher integration IC along
with a high performance, high complexity IC (the die size is not to scale).
(a) The first IC (Texas Instruments, 1958), (b) the first monolithic
IC (Fairchild Semiconductor, 1959), and (c) the high performance dual core Montecito microprocessor (Intel Corporation, 2005).