In 1959 Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments each invented the integrated circuit, etching a transistor onto a two- dimensional chip of silicon.

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Building a transistor that sticks out of its parental chip lets many of its component atoms be deployed more usefully particularly those that constitute the channel and the gate.

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One final piece of the competitive puzzle for TSMC is the economic inflection point that the chip business is approaching as transistor shrinkage increasingly encounters the limitations of physics.

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