geoPSYCHE An asteroid (205 km diam.) with unusual surface composition.

The meaning of psyche is 'the mind or self as a functional entity.' Each of us experience individual events that make us unique. The reflection of various forms of discoveries are shaped by its explorer. Would you like to find the reflection of ideas formed by this psyche?

This is a brief excerpt from Crystal Fire, New York, N.Y., 1997, and is the story o Jack Kilby*, Univ. of Illinois, working for Centralab-his first job: '' On July 24, a month after Bell Labs celebrated the transistor's decennial, Kilby had a sudden surge of inspiration. "Extreme miniaturization of many electrical circuits," he wrote in his lab notebook, "could be achieved by making resistors, capacitors and transistors & diodes on a single slice of silicon." Then, continuing on for five pages, he showed how to realize these components in practice and how an entire circuit might be assembled from them on a single silicon wafer.
A novel aspect of Kilby's brainstorm was to fabricate all the ordinary circuit elements from silicon, too. "Nobody would have made these components out of semiconductor material then," he reminisced. "It didn't make very good resistors or capacitors, and semiconductor materials were considered incredibly expensive."
*Died : 20/06/2005 "I didn't say, `Inventors are nice and I want to be one.'"

But doing so made monolithic integration possible. By fashioning an entire circuit on one side of a silicon wafer, using batch-processing techniques-for instance, diffusion and vapor deposition of metals-that were familiar to the semiconductor industry, he hoped to achieve big cost reductions. And the new photolithographic techniques becoming available at the time promised to allow much finer and more intricate geometric patterns on the silicon surface than the clumsier silkscreen process developed by Centralab.
By the time everybody returned from vacation, Kilby had ironed out his ideas. He presented them to his new boss, Willis Adcock, who suggested he first test his approach by making a circuit that employed discrete silicon com-ponents connected in the customary manner-using wires and solder. Kilby completed this preliminary test by the end of August 1958.
The next task was to make an oscillator circuit on a single piece of silicon. Here, however, Kilby ran into a minor stumbling block. Although it had pio-neered the silicon grown-junction transistor, Texas Instruments was slow in switching to diffusion. So there were no appropriate silicon samples readily available. Thus he turned back to germanium, obtaining several wafers with diffused transistor layers and contacts already in place. Technicians cut him a narrow bar nearly half an inch long with a single transistor on it. The bulk resistance of the crystalline germanium served as a resistor, while a P-N junc-tion formed on its surface was used as a capacitor. A few flimsy gold wires linked these components together.

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Crystal Fire cont...

"It looked crude, and it was crude," Kilby admitted. But it worked! On Sep-tember 12, with Adcock, Mark Shepherd, and a few others looking on, he applied 10 volts to the input leads. A wavy green line immediately undulated across the screen of his oscilloscope, indicating that the circuit was oscillating at more than 1 million times per second. The monolithic idea was finally a reality.
A week later Kilby demonstrated an integrated flip-flop circuit, made again of germanium, that incorporated two transistors. It, too, performed as he expected. Both of these prototypes were extremely awkward realizations of the much more sophisticated ideas he had penned into his notebook two months earlier. But the first prototype of an important technological idea is often crude-witness the first transistor. No matter how clumsy, Kilby's two gizmos proved beyond doubt that integrated circuits could indeed be built from a single slice of semiconductor material.''

Is there ever an end to what Jack Kilby started?

In 1997 I defended my thesis on Electrodeposited Semiconducting Cadmium Suplhide Thin Film Solar Cell Windows. After my graduation, I temporarily worked in manufacturing of semiconductor components. I have completed projects on neural networks and worked in IT on intelligent search engines. New discoveries and selected specialties in applied physics are most important to progress scientific discoveries. I have for goal to conttribute to science in cyberspace.