Christie's New York is auctioning off a 1958 prototype microchip, used by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments in his Nobel Prize-winning invention of putting an integrated circuit onto a single chip. Gifted to one of the lab employees by Kilby, the family has decided to sell it.

Estimated at $1,000,000 - $2,000,000, this prototype integrated circuit was built between July 18 and September 12, 1958, of a doubly diffused germanium wafer with flying gold wire and four leads.

While Kilby's chip with bondwire interconnect was first, it's interesting that Noyce's concept at Fairchild using Hoerni's planar technology with all interconnect fabricated using the same photolithography as the devices is pretty much how it's still done today.

Kilby's circuits, however, were "half-monolithic", since the problem of, e.g., insulating the parts and only working with doping was only solved later in Noyce's invention.

At Texas Instruments, an integrated circuit was called a "bar", not "chip" or "die", partly because that's what Jack called them. Wafers were called "slices", so yield was originally expressed in "good bars per slice".

GLTA,

R.