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Transistors were produced in great quantities during the 1950s but they were discrete elements: they were a device by themselves and needed to be wired to the other elements to form a circuit.
In 1958, an American engineer, Jack Kilby, built the first integrated circuit or chip i.e. a complete electric circuit, in a piece of germanium: it had five components joined together by wires.
Later, engineers were able to place several circuits on the same chip creating the first microprocessors.
With time, engineers were able to design and fabricate chips
that contained more and more transistors
on less and less surface.
From Large
Scale
Integration
(LSI)
to Very
Large
Scale
Integration
(VLSI),
we have now reached the Ultra
Large
Scale
Integration
(ULSI).
The small size of the transistor has allowed the rapid expansion of telecommunications.