Reading. 6.Read the text about the inventors of an integrated circuit and find the sentences in the Past Indefinite Tense (Active Voice)

6. Read the text about the inventors of an integrated circuit and find the sentences in the Past Indefinite Tense (Active Voice). Underline the Past Indefinite verb forms.

You've probably read in books that ICs were developed jointly by Jack Kilby(1923–2005) and Robert Noyce (1927–1990), as though these two men happily collaborated on their brilliant invention! In fact, Kilby and Noyce came up with the idea independently, at more or less exactly the same time, prompting a furious battle for the rights to the invention that was anything but happy.

How could two people invent the same thing at exactly the same time? Easy: integrated circuits were an idea waiting to happen. By the mid-1950s, the world (and the military, in particular) had discovered the amazing potential of electronic computers and it was blindingly apparent to visionaries like Kilby and Noyce that there needed to be a better way of building and connecting transistors in large quantities.

Kilby was working at Texas Instruments when he came upon the idea he called the monolithic principle: trying to build all the different parts of an electronic circuit on a silicon chip. On September 12, 1958, he hand-built the world's first, crude integrated circuit using a chip of germanium (a semiconducting element similar to silicon) and Texas Instruments applied for a patent on the idea the following year.

Meanwhile, at another company called Fairchild Semiconductor (formed by transistor pioneer William Shockley and a small group of associates), the equally brilliant Robert Noyce was experimenting with miniature circuits of his own. In 1959, he used a series of photographic and chemical techniques known as the planar process (which had just been developed by a colleague, Jean Hoerni) to produce the first, practical, integrated circuit, a method that Fairchild then tried to patent.

7. Read the text and make your own questions to it.

Although Kilby filed his patent first, Noyce's patent was granted earlier. Here are drawings from their original patent applications. You can see that we have essentially the same idea in both, with electronic components formed from junctions between layers of p-type (blue) and n-type (red) semiconductors. Connections to the p-type and n-type regions are shown in orange and yellow and the base layers (substrates) are shown in green.

Figure 4.4 Drawing from Kilby’s and Noyce’s original patent applications. Artworks courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office with added coloring to improve clarity and highlight the similarities.

There was considerable overlap between the two men's work and Texas Instruments and Fairchild battled in the courts for much of the 1960s over who had really developed the integrated circuit. Finally, in 1969, the companies agreed to share the idea.

8. Complete this description about Kilby and Noyce, using the correct form of the verbs in the box.

build on co-found note go on

Pay attention to the following verb forms: are regarded, developed, were inducted, was recognized, is remembered, is credited and incorporated.

Figure 4.3 Computer microchips like these – and all the appliances and gadgets that use them – owe their existence to Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. Photo by Warren Gretz courtesy of US Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory (US DOE/NREL).

Kilby and Noyce are now rightly regarded as joint-inventors of arguably the most important and far-reaching technology developed in the 20th century. Both men were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (Kilby in 1982, Noyce the following year) and Kilby's breakthrough was also recognized with the award of a half-share in the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 (as Kilby very generously (1) …………….. in his acceptance speech, Noyce would surely have shared in the prize too had he not died of a heart attack a decade earlier).

While Kilby is remembered as a brilliant scientist, Noyce's legacy has an added dimension. In 1968, he (2) …………………the Intel Electronics company with Gordon Moore (1929 –), which (3) ………….. to develop the microprocessor (single-chip computer) in 1974. With IBM, Microsoft, Apple, and other pioneering companies, Intel is credited with helping to bring affordable personal computers to our homes and workplaces. Thanks to Noyce and Kilby, and brilliant engineers who subsequently (4) …………….. their work, there are now something like two billion computers in use throughout the world, many of them incorporated into cellphones, portable satellite navigation devices, and other electronic gadgets.

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