The Texas Instruments SN51 Series - The First Integrated Circuits

About this Artwork This artwork is a mixed-media display celebrating the Texas Instruments SN51 Series. Introduced in the early 1960s, the Integrated Circuit changed the world. The vacuum tube and the transistor enabled huge leaps in the advancement of technology and science. However, neither has matched the firestorm of advances kindled by the Integrated Circuit. The density and power of Integrated Circuit has almost doubled every two years since its invention by Jack Kilby (of Texas Instruments) and Robert Noyce (of Fairchild Semiconductor, and later Intel). The SN51 Integrated Circuits were the first commercially available chips. They had the equivalent of just a handful of transistors, capacitors, and resistors, but the Integrated Circuit packed them in a far smaller and more efficient package. The SN514, to the right and pictured above, provided two complete 3-input NOR/NAND logic circuits on a single chip. Also, the SN514 was one of two chips used in the Interplanetary Monitoring