The Biggest Little Chip
Charles Platt | Make Vol. 10- 2007 | Pdf | 6 pgs | 2 mb
Back in 1970, when barely half a dozen corporate seedlings had taken root
in the fertile ground of Silicon Valley, a company named Signetics bought
an idea from an engineer named Hans Camenzind. It wasn't a breakthrough
concept, just 23 transistors and a bunch of resistors that would function as
a programmable timer. The timer would be versatile, stable, and simple, but
these virtues paled in comparison with its primary selling point. Using the
emerging technology of integrated circuits, Signetics could reproduce the
whole thing on a silicon chip.
This entailed some handiwork. Camenzind spent weeks using a drafting table
and a specially mounted X-Acto knife to scribe his circuit into a large plastic
sheet. Signetics then reduced this image photographically, etched it into tiny
wafers, and embedded each wafer in a half-inch rectangle of black plastic with
the product number printed on top. Thus, the 555 timer was born.
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