The silicon

Silicon Valley is known almost all over the world, but what determined the fame of this Californian place was the birth and mass diffusion of the computer. There, in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, due to a strange combination of fate, the largest industrial concentration of semiconductors, the basic material for the manufacture of integrated circuits and therefore microprocessors, has arisen, and there, today thrives the largest business in the world.

Few, however, know what silicon is, the element that gives its name to that valley of wealth. At the beginning of the 19th century, a group of scientists discovered a new chemical element: silicon. They were students of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. It was the great French chemist, in fact, who understood that quartz or silica (silicon dioxide) was the result of combining oxygen with an unidentified element. It was 1789, but research was abruptly interrupted by the premature death of the scientist, who ended up under the blade of Robespierre's guillotine. From that moment on, the history of this chemical element, which will prove to be the most abundant material on the Earth's crust, is intertwined with the history of technology: from steelmaking to wireless telegraphy, from military radar to transistors, it finds its application in various sectors. In the beginning, in fact, silicon competed for supremacy with another chemical element: germanium. Then, however, the abundance in nature and the possibility of obtaining samples of extreme purity, made the balance lean towards silicon.

But, even in the early 1950s, the importance of this material was not clear: a company like DuPont decided to stop production, not realising that wafers (those thin semiconductor discs on the surface of which integrated devices are made) of monocrystalline silicon would produce a turnover of billions of dollars. The "silicon era" begins, therefore, a decade later. It was then that the evolution of electronics based on this material took place, paving the way for the computer revolution we are experiencing.

Even the names of the protagonists of those years tell us that their era did not end at all: Texas Instrument and Intel (born from a rib of the Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968). In the Seventies there is a further acceleration of events: in 1971 microprocessors are born, in 1978 William Henry Gates founds Microsoft. The rest is today's history.[Immagine CC0 creative commons]

The challenge remains the same, from the beginning of the computer age to the present day, to put more and more integrated components on a single chip, decreasing the size and increasing the performance and memory of the machines. Semiconductors play a key role in this challenge and with the silicon and Silicon Valley.