Originally "miniaturization" simply meant replacing light-bulb-sized tubes with jelly-bean-sized transistors. But a second breakthrough occurred in the 1960s, when engineers realized that the same technology used to create a single transistor on a semiconductor wafer could be used to create many interconnected transistors. Over time, engineers learned to put dozens, hundreds, thousand, and eventually millions of transistors onto a single chip, launching the "digital revolution." | Originally "miniaturization" simply meant replacing light-bulb-sized tubes with jelly-bean-sized transistors. But a second breakthrough occurred in the 1960s, when engineers realized that the same technology used to create a single transistor on a semiconductor wafer could be used to create many interconnected transistors. Over time, engineers learned to put dozens, hundreds, thousand, and eventually millions of transistors onto a single chip, launching the "digital revolution." |