The Chip (2001)

T.R. Reid chronicles the parallel breakthroughs of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce as they confronted the physical tyranny of numbers in early electronics. By fabricating resistors, capacitors, and transistors directly upon a single silicon substrate, they solved the crippling reliability compromises of hand-soldered wiring. It is an essential history of planar fabrication and the relentless material physics behind modern computing hardware.