A quick history of computers ENGR 40M Chuan-Zheng Lee Stanford - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

A quick history of computers

ENGR 40M Chuan-Zheng Lee Stanford University 10 July 2017

Vacuum tubes

ENGR 40M Summer 2017 — C.Z. Lee, J. Plummer, R. Howe

• ENIAC,

1946

• 18,000

vacuum tubes

http://explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=1-2-920

Bipolar junction transistor

• Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, 1947
• Nobel Prize in Physics, 1956

ENGR 40M Summer 2017 — C.Z. Lee, J. Plummer, R. Howe

Miniaturization

ENGR 40M Summer 2017 — C.Z. Lee, J. Plummer, R. Howe

• ’

“ ”

• 1960 and 1990 i nt egr at
• ’

“ ”

Point contact transistor 1947 First integrated circuit 1958 Modern microprocessor

• MOSFETs were invented in 1959 (Kahng and Atalla, Bell Labs)
• Modern silicon chips have billions of components in a 1 cm² area.

Moore’s law

“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate

• f roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate

can be expected to continue, if not to increase.” — Gordon Moore, 1965

ENGR 40M Summer 2017 — C.Z. Lee, J. Plummer, R. Howe

Transistors, transistors, transistors

• The processor in your computer is basically

billions of transistors.

ENGR 40M Summer 2017 — C.Z. Lee, J. Plummer, R. Howe