Circuits, signals and telecommunications
In 1959, Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs turned decades-old field-effect ideas into a working insulated-gate transistor by controlling the silicon–silicon-dioxide interface. The first MOSFET was slow and initially neglected, but its simple insulated gate became the foundation of scalable MOS and CMOS integrated circuits.
A Taiwanese team led by NYCU and TSMC turns the interface between a monolayer semiconductor and its gate dielectric into a functional part of the transistor, sidestepping the long-standing trade-off between dielectric thinness and carrier transport.
On September 12, 1958, Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments: a phase-shift oscillator on a germanium slab measuring 11 × 1.6 mm, containing 1 transistor, 1 capacitor, and 3 resistors — the first step toward Moore's Law and the digital age.
In September 1895, Guglielmo Marconi transmits a wireless telegraph signal over 2.4 km on the family estate of Villa Griffone, near Bologna. On December 12, 1901, at Signal Hill (Newfoundland), he receives the letter "S" (three Morse dots) sent from Poldhu (Cornwall), spanning 3,500 km of Atlantic. Nobel Prize in Physics 1909. Radio today underpins a $1.8 trillion ecosystem (wireless telecoms, 2024).
Raspberry Pi Ltd has officially launched the Pico 2. Built on the new RP2350 chip, it lets developers choose between two ARM Cortex-M33 cores, two RISC-V cores, or one core of each type.
In 1837, Samuel Morse files a caveat (US patent no. 1,647 would not be granted until June 20, 1840) for a single-wire electric telegraph capable of transmitting 10 words per minute at the propagation speed of current (~200,000 km/s in a copper conductor) — for the first time, information outruns the human messenger.