With time to tinker, he wondered how to reduce the number of wires that were needed to string different transistors together. Rather than use a separate piece of silicon or germanium to build each transistor, he thought of assembling multiple components on the same piece of semiconductor material. When his colleagues returned from summer vacation, they realized that Kilby’s idea was revolutionary. Multiple transistors could be built into a single slab of silicon or germanium. Kilby called his invention an “integrated circuit,” but it became known colloquially as a “chip,” because each
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