History of Programmable Logic

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Vacuum tubes ruled in first half of 20th century Large, expensive, power-hungry, unreliable

1940s 
Arrival of Solid State Electronics

1940 - PN junction

Russel Ohl at Bell Labs develops the PN junction that produces 0.5 volts when exposed to light.

1947: first point contact transistor
John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs

1950s
Birth of IC

1951 - Junction Transistor invented
William Shockley developed the junction Transistor

1954 - First commercial silicon transistor

1954 - Oxide masking process developed

1955 - First field effect transistor

Bell Labs fabricated the first field effect transistor.

1958: First integrated circuit
Flip-flop using two transistors
Built by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments

1960s

Small Scale Integration (SSI) Era  early 60s  10s of transistors on a chip

1960 - First MOSFET fabricated

Kahng at Bell Labs fabricates the first MOSFET.

1961 - First commercial ICs

Fairchild and Texas Instruments both introduce commercial ICs.

1962 - Transistor-Transistor Logic invented

1963 - First MOS IC
RCA produces the first PMOS IC.

1963 - CMOS invented
rank Wanlass at Fairchild Semiconductor originated and published the idea of complementary-MOS (CMOS).

Medium Scale Integratoin (MSI) Era  late 60s  100s of transistors on a chip

1965 - Moore's law

In 1965 Gordon Moore, director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor wrote a paper for Electronics entitled "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits".

1966 - Single transistor DRAM cell invented

1969 - BiCMOS invented
Lin, Ho, Iyer and Kwong disclose a "Complementary MOS-Bipolar Transistor Structure" .

1970s

Large Scale Integration (LSI) Era  1000s of transistor on a chip
1970’s processes usually had only nMOS transistors

1970-  first PLD  was introduced, known as PROM

1970 - 1st NMOS IC
Cogar, at IBM fabricate metal gate NMOS

1970 - First commercial DRAM - 1Kbits

1971 - UVEPROM invented

1971- 4-bit 4004 processor by intel

1972 - Digital Signal Processor invented by John Murtha, of Westinghouse

1972 - MOSFET Scaling

1973 - Commercial BiCMOS ICs

Polinsky, Schade and Keller of RCA disclose "CMOS-Bipolar Monolithic Integrated Circuit Technology" .

1975- Programmable Logic Array PLAs became available

1978- Programmable Array Logic or PAL by MMI
 
1978 - Intel 8086/8088 Processor

1980s

VLSI Era 10,000s of transistors on a chip (later 100,000s & now 1,000,000s)
1980s-present: CMOS processes for low power

1980 - Modern DSP commercially available

1981 - 150mm silicon wafers introduced

1983 - 1st CMOS DRAM
Intel develops a 1Mbit CMOS DRAM

1983 - EEPROM Invented
16Kbit EEPROMs introduced based on the floating gate and MNOS.

1983 - Generic Array Logic (GAL) by Lattice Semiconductor

1984 - Flash memory invented by Masuoka,  of Toshiba

1985 - Commercial Flash memory introduced
Toshiba introduces a 256Kbit flash memory chip.

1985 - 200mm silicon wafers introduced

1985- Xilinx introduced FPGA

1990s

1993 - Intel Pentium processor

1996 - 300mm silicon wafers introduced

2000s

2000 - Intel Pentium 4