Short answers, pulled from the story.
Karl Ferdinand Braun discovered that a crystal could detect electrical signals in 1874, creating the first semiconductor device. This observation occurred decades before the electron was identified and planted the seed for the entire age of technology.
John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain invented the first working point-contact transistor in 1947 at Bell Labs. This device eventually replaced the bulky vacuum tubes that had dominated the field for decades.
The IBM 608 became the first IBM product to use transistor circuits without any vacuum tubes in April 1955. This machine contained more than 3,000 germanium transistors and was the first all-transistorized calculator manufactured for the commercial market.
An estimated 13 sextillion MOSFETs have been manufactured between 1960 and 2018. The MOSFET is the basic element in most modern electronic equipment and the most widely used electronic device in the world.
The United States global share of semiconductor manufacturing capacity fell to 12% in 2022. This decline occurred over three decades as the industry shifted overwhelmingly to East Asia, starting with the initial movement of microchip mass-production there in the 1970s.
Popular electronic design automation software programs include NI Multisim, Cadence, EAGLE PCB, and Altium. These tools allow engineers to design circuits using premanufactured building blocks such as power supplies, semiconductors, and integrated circuits.