SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
What do you consider to be the biggest technological advancement for electrical components?
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 68 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 17 2018, @08:27PM (5 children)
Everything is inevitable in hindsight.
Discrete transistors were cool, but they were just a small leap forward from tubes. Fitting 800 million transistors into a fingernail sized chip? That's orders of magnitude bigger of a change in capability.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:26PM (2 children)
I read a book about the history of electronics recently. What fascinated me was that after ICs got started, the race was on to emulate every thinkable electric component using ICs: relay (that's the transistor), resistor, capacitors, impedance and we are still not finished: antennas, all kinds of sensors. As somebody else mentioned on SN, we are on our way to the tricoder - in the end it will be an implantable IC.
Therefore, my vote went wholeheartedly for IC.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 21 2018, @07:09PM (1 child)
I did an interview once where they quizzed me on miniaturization and low-costing of various circuits. We came to the inductor as one of the remaining hard-cases to make small and cheap - there are some printed circuit methods to get limited inductance with multi-layer processes, but if you need a really stout L value (not just inductance-like behavior in a transfer function) you still need a real coil.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @05:47AM
Same applies to capacitors. You can get small values on die, but nothing huge. Inductors are the same, you can get small values on die, but nothing huge. By huge, I'm talking about useful values for power handling purposes.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday December 07 2018, @08:42PM (1 child)
There is no direct physical link or line of development between tubes and transistors; but there is such between transistors and ICs.
Before ICs, it was common to put low power cicuits, with transistors, coils, resistors and capacitors, all together in a pot and fill it with setting epoxy resin, leaving only the external connecting wires sticking out. I have old audio kit in my attic where you can see that. These were effectively integrated circuits, just rather large ones at typically a couple of cubic inches. At first "potting" was like an afterthought, done a bit amateurishly, but it did not take a genius to design components specifically to be put in a small protective envelope that we now call an IC. OTOH you could consider the inventions of the vacuum tube and of the transistor as genius.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 07 2018, @09:47PM
In macro-theory, tubes and transistors are both voltage controlled switches. Of course tubes require much higher voltages and have all different kinds of leakage characteristics and non-linearities compared with transistors, but... end of day, they're both VCSs.
It's one thing to say that a microchip is just a bunch of discrete transistors, because the same basic principles and materials used control their switching, but the whole photo-lithographic process that implements a discrete transistor on an almost arbitrarily small scale on a substrate, reliably enough to have hundreds of millions of them laid out in logical circuits... that's quite an enabling leap, even if it looks obvious in hindsight.
I worked in a factory stuffing resistors, capacitors and transistors into PCBs in 1987... being able to do that through photo-lithography instead of hand assembly is just about as revolutionary as Gutenburg's printing press as compared to manual copying. Without the photo-lithography we might have eventually developed robotic PCB stuffers, but I'd argue that the micro-chips made from photolithography were a necessary prerequisite to have practical / affordable robotic PCB stuffers. If you've seen the movie Hugo, (spoiler alert) the writing automaton was technically possible with gears and springs, but such a device is much less costly and difficult to make with micro-circuits, and much more capable of varied output.
🌻🌻 [google.com]