4 ms·
Well, in the 1800s steam locomotives were considered to be awesome high-tech. The famous HMS Rattler vs. Alecto trial which proved the superiority of propellers
by jabl 9y ago
Well, in the 1800s steam locomotives were considered to be awesome high-tech. The famous HMS Rattler vs. Alecto trial which proved the superiority of propellers over paddles for ship propulsion was in 1845.
Even on the basic science level, Maxwell published his seminal treatise on classical electromagnetism in 1873, and it wasn't until 1881 that Heaviside published them in the form we know them today and that sort-of made people understand them. Semiconductors were sort-of known already in the early 1800s, but it wasn't until the, say, first half of the 20th century when we really started to understand them with the development of solid state physics (both theoy and experimental methods such as x-ray diffraction etc.).
So yes, while some aspects of lithography could have been developed in the 1800s, I think there was quite a huge gap between that and a whole lot of other things needed.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoWe didn't have the semiconductor science needed to make effective ICs until we started building them. The logic is relatively easy, but the materials science needed to decide what to lithograph, using which materials, and in what order, is post-WWII, and probably couldn't have been invented much earlier. It takes a lot of work to work out ideal doping factors and diffusion rates, estimate charge distributions across junctions, calculate propagation speeds, and eliminate leakage. But more - the chemistry of semiconductor doping and deposition is often rather nasty, and it would have been a huge challenge to industrialise it before WWII.
- avs733 9y agoI think this is a pretty reasonable answer...summed up, you could have all the steps but you were missing two things: 1) the theoretical knowledge of how the devices worked, which enabled the creation of steps in the process that resulted in fully working devices 2) the ability do do each step repeatably and precisely and reliably.
- Taniwha 9y agowell most chips these days are done with FETs which don't really need semiconductors in the way we usually think about them ... and FETs were invented (and largely forgotten) before bipolar transistors ... but doped semiconductors does make it easy to make FETs
- sehugg 9y agoWe didn't even have a practical vacuum tube AND gate until 1930, and a formal treatment of logic design until 1936-1937. It's doubtful the need for ICs was well understood. And they would be expensive until there was a big enough market to produce them at scale.