The first solid circuits are now commercially available, marking the beginning of a new era for the electronics industry. Texas Instruments, Inc., which developed the monolithic devices, has produced evaluation quantities of a binary multivibrator operating at a 200-kc repetition rate.
According to the company, the solid circuits are produced by extensions of mesa-transistor production techniques. Diffusion, oxide-masking, evaporation and chemical forming are used to make a single-crystal semiconductor wafer behave as a complete circuit. Thus "most reliability-decreasing interconnections are eliminated," the company says.
Orders are being accepted for solid-circuit logic blocks, gates, oscillators, NOR circuits and flip-flops. The multivibrator available for evaluation measures 0.250 x 0.125 x 0.131 in. (Electronic Design, March 30, 1960, p. 11)
TI, which had unveiled its ICs a year earlier at the IRE Show in New York, now was ready to take them to market. But, as noted above, Fairchild was close behind with its planar process.