*Corporate Officer
HORIBA, Ltd.
Senior Corporate Officer
HORIBA STEC, CO., Ltd.
Executive Vice President,
HORIBA Instuments Incorporated
In 1959 Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild developed and patented the basic concept and manufacturing technology of the integrated circuit. Soon after this, in the early 60’s, computers were being constructed with what we would consider this very basic technology. The remarkable part of this semiconductorbased device was the scalability of silicon with a simple planar structure. Currently with billions of transistors on a single die, a basic smartphone processor has far more power than a Cray Supercomputer of the late 70’s. This revolution in materials and design has fundamentally changed the world and ushered in the age of information. One could compare how early electrification opened a new world of possibilities in a similar way to what is happening today. With the common use of the internet, smartphones and cloud computing, we are quickly entering the age of ubiquitous computing and our lives and world are defined by it. This now has enabled the 4th industrial revolution and with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), it is easy to see how the world as we know it is completely dependent and defined by the computational capability of integrated circuits (IC’s).
