‘IC’ stands for integrated circuit, and in I is for IC from Circuit Playground, Adabot learns that there’s a lot going on inside of them and without them, our electronics would still be huge. From Explain That Stuff:
The basic idea was to take a complete circuit, with all its many components and the connections between them, and recreate the whole thing in microscopically tiny form on the surface of a piece of silicon. It was an amazingly clever idea and it’s made possible all kinds of “microelectronic” gadgets we now take for granted, from digital watches and pocket calculators to Moon-landing rockets and missiles with built-in satellite navigation.
Integrated circuits revolutionized electronics and computing during the 1960s and 1970s… In 1965, Gordon Moore of the Intel Company, a leading chip maker, noticed that the number of components on a chip was doubling roughly every one to two years. Moore’s Law, as this is known, has continued to hold ever since. Interviewed by The New York Times 50 years later, in 2015, Moore revealed his astonishment that the law has continued to hold: “The original prediction was to look at 10 years, which I thought was a stretch. This was going from about 60 elements on an integrated circuit to 60,000—a thousandfold extrapolation over 10 years. I thought that was pretty wild. The fact that something similar is going on for 50 years is truly amazing.”
Further reading at NobelPrize.org: The History of the Integrated Circuit.
Catch up with Circuit Playground on this site. Plus: DIY Electric Dough.
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