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Concept

integrated circuit

A close-up view of an integrated circuit with a central square component and intricate gold-colored wiring on a dark background.

A complete electronic circuit etched onto a single small wafer of semiconductor, usually silicon. Invented independently by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild in 1958–59, it replaced bundles of discrete transistors with a single component that could be mass-produced. NASA's Apollo orders in the early 1960s consumed most of the world's supply and seeded the modern semiconductor industry.

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