IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Winter 2021 - 81

SSCS Switzerland and Italy Chapters Host Joint
IEEE Day Celebration

The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society
(SSCS) Switzerland and Italy Chapters organized a video conference
focusing on the microchip revolution as part of their joint IEEE Day
celebration. One hundred fourteen
attendees from the two Sections attended the event.
Since 2017, more than 1 trillion
chips have been produced each year
in gigantic factories that make semiconductors for all the tech companies. This volume represents more
than 100 microchips per person
globally, which provides a perspective on how this 60-year-old technology has influenced our everyday
life. Within 1 mm2 of silicon CMOS
7-nm technology [1], one can find
ten times more transistors than
there are people in the world. With
this background, a program was organized to offer two presentations.
The first was related to the recently published book The Microchip
Revolution: A Brief History [2], by LucOlivier Bauer and Marshall Wilder.
Both authors joined the event. They
dedicated their book to Dr. Jean
Amédée Hoerni (1924-1997), a Swiss
scientist who studied at the University of Geneva and the University of
Cambridge. He taught at Caltech until he was hired by Bill Shockley to
work at Mountain View Labs, where
he become the only non-American
partner of the " traitorous eight engineers " who, in 1957, founded Fairchild Semiconductors in Palo Alto,
California. Two years later, he filed
the fundamental patent on the planar process, celebrated by IEEE Milestone 93 in 2009 [4]. Subsequently,
together with Bob Noyce, he filed a
patent covering silicon ICs, which
are also known as silicon chips or
microchips. The rest is history.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2020.3035984
Date of current version: 25 January 2021

The Microchip Revolution: A Brief History,
discussed as part of the IEEE SSCS
Switzerland and Italy Chapters' joint IEEE
Day celebration.

The introduction to Murari's speech about
multiple silicon technologies on a chip.

Even though later scientists and
engineers further developed the
technology, today's semiconductor
industry success is due to early innovators. Numerous books have
been written to introduce the founders of the semiconductor industry,
the early companies, and their successes and failures. But the treatments are often limited to the early
1970s. Bauer and Wilder's book on
the other hand, covers a large time
span, starting in 1957 and ending
in 1999, with great attention to the
bibliography. It includes fascinating documents from the business
and technical perspectives and discusses the organizations and people

who were involved. The authors also
examine the tensions between the
United States and China related to
the semiconductor industry [3].
While the first presentation focused on the production means
that have enabled the well-known
Moore's law, the second introduced
a European standpoint by Bruno Murari, who pioneered the more-thanMoore concept during the 1980s. On
30 September 2020, the IEEE Board
of Directors ratified the paradigm
of multiple silicon technologies on a
chip as an IEEE Milestone [3]. Murari,
too, joined the call and delivered a
brief talk.
History developed in Italy, too,
with multiple silicon technologies
on a chip. During the past 35 years,
multipower bipolar-CMOS-doublediffused-MOSFET technology has
become widely adopted by the automotive, industrial, and consumer
industries. It is now one of several
standard platforms in the semiconductor industry that has reached
commercial success. Functional integration has followed along multiple
paths. On one side, thanks to the
availability of mature CMOS technology, an increasing number of digital
functions and a growing amount of
memory have been integrated with
analog and power devices. Major challenges have been overcome to merge
increasingly complex CMOS devices
with high-performance power transistors. At the same time, complex
IC design has required significant efforts related to the process architecture and characterization to enable
the successful integration of complex
logic cores and memory with large
current power stages.
The success story continues to
unfold, and advanced technology
nodes that are as small as 40 nm and
have embedded nonvolatile memory solutions are being announced,
enabling added intelligence for

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